I’m still thinking long and hard about the recipe box I’m covering with paper for our niece.  It’s definitely a project that’s going to take some time, I think.

So I decided to kick it to the curb, for now.  Wow, already terminology I’ll need to research.

Here’s the scoop.

It means “discard.” In many places in the USA, garbage is left in front of the house, at the curb, usually at the bottom of the driveway. This facilitates collection by the sanitation trucks (garbage collectors).

Huh, makes a lot of sense.

I have had an idea of a video I’ve been thinking of making for a while and today is the day to give it a try.  I saw Tim Holtz do this process with Carol Duvall from a very old video, at least ten years old.  He turns a rubber stamp into it’s own stamp pad.  I don’t think it makes much sense when I say it, so you’ll probably just want to watch the video.  I want to use my four bird stamp from Carolyn Shores Wright as it takes forever for me to watercolor pencil, and I refuse to do anything less with it.  Cross your fingers for me.  Wow, this is the first blog that had two pieces of slang that I need to find their origins.  Of course, I know what crossing my fingers means but I don’t know what the origin is. And now I do, well I maybe have a clue.

This is what mentalfloss.com has to say about it.

Crossing fingers to achieve your own good luck or in a display of hopeful solidarity that things go well for someone else is one of the most widely recognized symbols in the Western world. This is in part because of the gesture’s long history—although originally, it was not a solo act.

There are two main theories regarding the origins of finger-crossing for luck. The first dates to a pre-Christianity Pagan belief in Western Europe in the powerful symbolism of a cross. The intersection was thought to mark a concentration of good spirits and served to anchor a wish until it could come true. The practice of wishing upon a cross in those early European cultures evolved to where people would cross their index finger over that of someone expressing a wish to show support. Eventually, wish-makers realized they could go it alone and impart the benefit of a present cross to their wishes without another person’s participation, first crossing their two index fingers and finally adopting the one-handed practice we still use today.

The alternate explanation cites the early days of Christianity, when practitioners were persecuted for their beliefs. To recognize fellow Christians, people developed a series of hand gestures, one of which involved forming the ichthys, or fish symbol, by touching thumbs and crossing index fingers. This theory doesn’t fully explain how luck initially became associated with the gesture, but it does posit that the solo finger cross developed during the bloody Hundred Years War by soldiers eager for anything that might curry God’s favor.

So there you go.  I never realized how many of these slang sayings I use until doing this blog.  I’m a huge slang user and didn’t even know it.  Well at least if you aren’t familiar with these terms, I’m saving you the research into what they mean.  It might be easier if I just stopped using them, but what’s the fun in that?

 

 

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