Even after students at Washington State University head home from class, they’ve got a long list of things that have to be done: Write a lab report. Do the laundry. Or, perhaps, take part in an online sex sting.
Last year seven students at the university hit the chatrooms as part of a program coordinated by the local police department. The students, posing as adolescent girls, arranged meetings with older men—at which point police officers stepped in to arrest the marks. The program has resulted in seven arrests, but skeptics may wonder if college students should be spending their time scouring the Internet for would-be sex offenders. (KOMO-TV)
14 Responses to Students vs. Sex Offenders
dank48 - November 23, 2011 at 11:21 am
Well, as you mention, there are guineas. My grandmother had guineas when I was young, and that’s what she usually called them. Sometimes though she’d say “guinea hens,” although I doubt that they were all female; similarly, you occasionally hear people refer to peafowl of both sexes as peacocks rather than peacocks and peahens. I don’t believe I ever heard a reference to guinea cocks or guinea roosters; this might be an unusual example of the feminine used for the feminine and masculine.
mkt42 - November 23, 2011 at 6:30 pm
Okay, but this makes me wonder: where did guinea pigs get their name from?
jffoster - November 23, 2011 at 6:44 pm
“… there seems to be no other bird, or food, that is designated by the name of the country alone.”
This is true of English, so far as I know. But the Turkish word for _turkey_ is —
_Hindi_.
João Nelas - November 23, 2011 at 8:12 pm
Well, in Portuguese the work for turkey is peru, so as least we got the continent right :)
jffoster - November 23, 2011 at 9:58 pm
and you serve it next to Chili, eh Senhor?
tlmna - November 24, 2011 at 8:30 pm
And in modern Hebrew, “India”, or “Indian rooster.”
oscarw - November 26, 2011 at 11:51 am
The guajolotl got the name of “turkey” when the Spaniards brought some to Euope. Turkey was thought to be so exotic that the natural name for the bird became a “turkey” because of its exotic nature and, it’s easier to say than the Nahuatl name (guajolotl) used by the Aztecs.
David Cantor - November 26, 2011 at 1:29 pm
Its not quite a perfect match, but the audible similarity between “Chile” and “Chili” is pretty close.
jffoster - November 27, 2011 at 5:02 pm
In most dialects of American English, they’re identical.
estudiante - November 29, 2011 at 5:23 am
Did the English colonists really eat turkey
during their first harvest meal with the Indians? No one is sure. They did dine
on fowl of various sorts. some of the fowl they served resembled ones they
called “Turkie cockes and Turkie hennes.” The first Europeans to
lay eyes on the bird we call a turkey were Christopher Columbus and the crew of
his fourth American voyage. They called the animal, “gallina de tierra nueva” meaning chicken of the new land chicken.
In Mexico, Spanish conquistadors came across a domesticated version of a bird the
Aztecs called the “huexoloti.” The
Spanish sent it back home, to wide culinary success. By 1530, the bird was
common on Spanish poultry farms, and not long after in British barnyards as
well. It was there that this New World creature became confused with another,
somewhat similar-looking species of bird. These birds originated in Turkey and
were brought to Europe and England and by the late 16th century, these “turkies” became the principal food
bird in the British Empire. The North American bird that the English colonists
came upon was probably a variant of the aforementioned, “huexoloti.”
In any event, the association of turkey with
Thanksgiving didn’t actually occur until hundreds of years later, with the 1889
publication of “Standish of Standish” a novel by Jane G. Austin that included a highly romanticized account of
the first Indian and Pilgrim food fest. In it, the hunters bring back wild turkeys,
which the Pilgrims bemoan as being pathetically paltry, compared to the
domesticated version they had back in England. One of the hunters then has the bright
idea for making make the birds “seem more like their brethren” across the
seas by putting stuffing in them. Thus, a morsel and a myth morphed into the present
Thanksgiving; a day devoted to monstrous meals, mega-football games and malfunctioning
relationships.
Did the English colonists really eat turkey
during their first harvest meal with the Indians? No one is sure. They did dine
on fowl of various sorts. some of the fowl they served resembled ones they
called “Turkie cockes and Turkie hennes.” The first Europeans to
lay eyes on the bird we call a turkey were Christopher Columbus and the crew of
his fourth American voyage. They called the animal, “gallina de tierra nueva” meaning chicken of the new land chicken.
In Mexico, Spanish conquistadors came across a domesticated version of a bird the
Aztecs called the “huexoloti.” The
Spanish sent it back home, to wide culinary success. By 1530, the bird was
common on Spanish poultry farms, and not long after in British barnyards as
well. It was there that this New World creature became confused with another,
somewhat similar-looking species of bird. These birds originated in Turkey and
were brought to Europe and England and by the late 16th century, these “turkies” became the principal food
bird in the British Empire. The North American bird that the English colonists
came upon was probably a variant of the aforementioned, “huexoloti.”
In any event, the association of turkey with
Thanksgiving didn’t actually occur until hundreds of years later, with the 1889
publication of “Standish of Standish” a novel by Jane G. Austin that included a highly romanticized account of
the first Indian and Pilgrim food fest. In it, the hunters bring back wild turkeys,
which the Pilgrims bemoan as being pathetically paltry, compared to the
domesticated version they had back in England. One of the hunters then has the bright
idea for making make the birds “seem more like their brethren” across the
seas by putting stuffing in them. Thus, a morsel and a myth morphed into the present
Thanksgiving; a day devoted to monstrous meals, mega-football games and malfunctioning
relationships.
estudiante - November 29, 2011 at 5:47 am
Did the English colonists really eat turkey during their first harvest meal with the Indians? No one is sure. They did dine on fowl of various sorts. Perhaps some of the fowl they served resembled ones they called “Turkie cockes and Turkie hennes.” back home. Europeans to lay eyes on the bird we call a turkey were Christopher Columbus and the crew of his fourth American voyage. They called the animal, “gallina de tierra nueva” meaning chicken of the new land.
In Mexico, Spanish conquistadors came across a domesticated version of a bird theAztecs called the “huexoloti.” The Spanish sent it back home, to wide culinary success. By 1530, the bird was common on Spanish poultry farms, and not long after in British barnyards as well. It was there that this New World creature became confused with another, somewhat similar-looking species of bird. These birds originated in Turkey and were brought to Europe and England and by the late 16th century, these “turkies” became the principal food bird in the British Empire. The North American bird that the English colonists came upon was probably a variant of the aforementioned, “huexoloti.”
In any event, the association of turkey with Thanksgiving didn’t actually occur until hundreds of years later, with the 1889 publication of “Standish of Standish” a novel by Jane G. Austin that included an account of the first Indian and Pilgrim dinner party. In it, the hunters bring back wild turkeys, which the Pilgrims complain as being terribly tough, compared to the domesticated version they had back in England. One of the hunters then has the bright idea for making make the birds seem more English-like tby putting stuffing in them. Thus, a morsel and a myth morphed into the present Thanksgiving; a day devoted to monstrous meals, mega-football games and malfunctioning relationships.
Chris Marrou - November 29, 2011 at 12:18 pm
The French refer to the bird as a Dinde, from d’Inde, or “from India.” Perhaps since we had already named the natives as Indians (also incorrectly), we had to use another nation…
jffoster - November 29, 2011 at 1:44 pm
And when I was young — maybe even now, the British referred to ‘corn’, i.e. zea mais, as “Indian corn”, the “indian” being of course the American Indians who domesticated it. “Corn’ in British English, as in languages on the continent, refers to any grain, or to the primary grain of a particular area.
Terry Collmann - December 6, 2011 at 5:38 am
No, we call it “maize”. “Corn” isn’t used much, except in compounds (“cornflour”, which is maize flour, “cornfield”, which is any field growing wheat, barley or similar grain, and “cornflower”, a blue flower found growing in cornfields.)