Now before y’all get yer knickers in a twist, wait until we say our piece. This episode honors my ancestors, who fled the UK because of religious persecution. Read this excerpt for the full story:
A redneck is a white, working class US southerner, often with provincial and insular attitudes. It is most likely a reference to the sun-burned necks of those who work in the fields all day. But it could be a reference to either anger or pellagra, which can both turn the neck red.
fromscotshistoryonline.co.uk
The origins of this term Redneck are Scottish and refer to supporters of the National Covenant and The Solemn League and Covenant, or “Covenanters”, largely Lowland Presbyterians, many of whom would flee Scotland for Ulster (Northern Ireland) during persecutions by the British Crown.
The Covenanters of 1638 and 1641 signed the documents that stated that Scotland desired the Presbyterian form of church government and would not accept the Church of England as its official state church.Many Covenanters signed in their own blood and wore red pieces of cloth around their necks as distinctive insignia; hence the term “Red neck”, which became slang for a Scottish dissident.Since many Ulster-Scottish settlers in America (especially the South) were Presbyterian, the term was applied to them, and then, later, their Southern descendants.
This was a very special episode, since we had Cat-with-a-C Givens co-host with me. Joe was on assignment in Plano, Texas. Since Cat was at the station anyway, she agreed to hop in the microphone and help me out. Here’s an excerpt from this episode of “KatsSoup”:
The Dumbest Things Ever Done by Airport Security
If there’s one holiday ritual we all know and hate, it’s that yearly trip to the airport, where the friendly security man awaits with his X-ray machine, his metal detector and possibly a well-lubed rubber glove.
While none of us want to spend the holidays involved in a terrorist incident (unless you’re living in the Die Hard universe), you have to admit that sometimes security gets a little out of hand. And then there are horror stories like..
All Men Named David Nelson are Terrorists Just Another Day In Line: You probably know that all airline passenger lists are compared against a no-fly list, which the TSA didn’t even want to admit existed at one time. The problem is that, as it turns out, sometimes more than one person in the world shares the same name.
Uh-Oh: So, you can imagine the chaos that erupted when a “David Nelson” somehow wound up on the list. That name isn’t exactly as distinctive as, say, Flavor Flav, so the result was many, many David Nelsons getting pulled out of line every single time they flew (including one David Nelson who got called out by security four times on one trip).
It doesn’t help that the process to get your name removed from the watch list takes at least a month and a half, and the ACLU had to sue to even get that. In a nice touch of irony, one of the lawyers who was working for the ACLU was named…David Nelson.
To Make Things Worse… An easier way to get off the no-fly list is to just change your name, as one Canadian man did. Yes, the entire no-fly list is founded on the idea that terrorists are stupid enough to fly using their own name. Now, of course the whole “block every flyer with the same name” thing doesn’t apply to the obvious cases. Like they’re not pulling little David Nelson babies out of the line or anything, right? … Right?
Uh-Oh: Yep, TSA employees pulled Matthew Gardner out of the line because somebody with that name showed up on a federal Most Wanted list.
Matthew is five. Agents searched the belongings of both Matthew and his mom. When the mother went to comfort the upset child, she was told to back away. Because, you know, it totally says right here on the screen he like shot six dudes at a bank in Reno. But, hey, we’ve heard of little kid suicide bombers before, right? It could happen. And really, can you ever be too careful?
There were 3 more stories in this segment. You’ll just have to listen to the .mp3 link above if you’re curious.
One supposed origin is that the phrase derives from mythology. Dogs and wolves were attendants to Odin, the god of storms, and sailors associated them with rain. Witches, who often took the form of their familiars – cats, are supposed to have ridden the wind. Well, some evidence would be nice. There doesn’t appear to be any to support this notion.
It has also been suggested that cats and dogs were washed from roofs during heavy weather. This is a widely repeated tale. It got a new lease of life with the e-mail message “Life in the 1500s”, which began circulating on the Internet in 1999. Here’s the relevant part of that:
I’ll describe their houses a little. You’ve heard of thatch roofs, well that’s all they were. Thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. They were the only place for the little animals to get warm. So all the pets; dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, bugs, all lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery so sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Thus the saying, “it’s raining cats and dogs.”
This is nonsense of course. It hardly needs debunking but, lest there be any doubt, let’s do that anyway. In order to believe this tale we would have to accept that dogs lived in thatched roofs, which, of course, they didn’t. Even accepting that bizarre idea, for dogs to have slipped off when it rained they would have needed to be sitting on the outside of the thatch – hardly the place an animal would head for as shelter in bad weather.
Another suggestion is that ‘raining cats and dogs’ comes from a version of the French word ‘catadoupe’, meaning waterfall. Again, no evidence. If the phrase were just ‘raining cats’, or even if there also existed a French word ‘dogadoupe’, we might be going somewhere with this one. As there isn’t, let’s pass this by.
There’s a similar phrase originating from the North of England – ‘raining stair-rods’. No one has gone to the effort of speculating that this is from mythic reports of stairs being carried into the air in storms and falling on gullible peasants. It’s just a rather expressive phrase giving a graphic impression of heavy rain – as is ‘raining cats and dogs’.
The much more probable source of ‘raining cats and dogs’ is the prosaic fact that, in the filthy streets of 17th/18th century England, heavy rain would occasionally carry along dead animals and other debris. The animals didn’t fall from the sky, but the sight of dead cats and dogs floating by in storm sewers could well have caused the coining of this colourful phrase. Jonathan Swift described such an event in his satirical poem ‘A Description of a City Shower’, first published in the 1710 collection of the Tatler magazine. The poem was a denunciation of contemporary London society, and its meaning has been much debated. While the poem is metaphorical and doesn’t describe a specific flood, it seems that, in describing water-borne animal corpses, Swift was referring to an occurrence that his readers would have been well familiar with:
Now in contiguous Drops the Flood comes down, Threat’ning with Deluge this devoted Town. Now from all Parts the swelling Kennels flow, And bear their Trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all Hues and Odours seem to tell What Street they sail’d from, by their Sight and Smell. They, as each Torrent drives, with rapid Force, From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their Course,
And in huge Confluent join’d at Snow-Hill Ridge, Fall from the Conduit, prone to Holbourn-Bridge. Sweeping from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood, Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud, Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.
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