After reading Phillip Johnson’s numerous writings on evolution, I am able to see the blind, dogmatic reliance on Naturalism which underlies this whole discussion. Your inability to explain the origin of the term based on purely materialistic means proves beyond a doubt that the current scientific orthodoxy is fundamentally flawed and unable to resolve basic questions in any meaningful way. Why are you so hostile to the possibility that this saying is not a product of humans acting in isolation, but the result of a Higher Intelligence intervening in our world and creating the foundations of the reality which we experience? Clearly, you are not interested in truth unless that truth fits into the narrow boxes which you have constructed from your ignorance and arrogantly declared to be all there is to know.
I now return you to your discussion as I dislodge my tongue from its deeply embedded position in my cheek.
Is there no true way to get to the end of this? I think warrinner sums it up for me. Frank, your “speil” had me on the floor! May I copy it for friends? Ryan, like the straw men, ad hominems, and appeals to experts others of your ilk offer up when backed into a corner philosophically, your non sequitur reveals mere opinion without fact. Ridiculous ridicule, their stock in trade. Lest I be accused of sesquipedalianism, I beg you to keep your comments germane. If you do however have something substantial for us to “chew on”, start a post on the topic. Else how shall we improve? wink
I believe I amy reveal to you the wonderful etemology of the phrase “Holnein Meter”.
I think it may have been about 20 years ago while I was at a conference at MIT. I was telling a joke to Stephen Hawkins about the black hole and the antimatter particle - you know the one - when I was interrupted by Stephen, who had just seen this really hot grad student walk in the room. Being a genius, Stephen was obviously more interested in her nebulus region than in what I was saying, since he muttered as best he could “Holnein Meter”.
I said “what?”.
He replied “Holnein Meter!” and rolled his chair away in quite a hurry.
Turns out he was saying “Hold on, man, I want to meet her!”
I have many more explanations for the beginning of phrases and words, if you like!
I have an explanation, but it’s not for “whole nine yards/meters/pottles*/whatever”. But rather for “sophomore”.
This word comes from the days when college students would have to take a train from the West to the East Coast to go to school. Because they were just poor students, they usually had to take the least desirable seats on the train. Because the heat from the sun made them uncomfortable, these seats were on the south side of the train which were on the right side going to college and the left side coming home. So their tickets were stamped SOPH for Starboard Out, Port Home and students were sometimes called “sophs”.
After a while, it was noted that second year students tended to be the poorest college students. So they had to travel SOPH MORE than the others, thus they became known as sophomores.
It’s a code phrase used by the Illuminated order of Masons and…AAAAARRRRRRGGGG!!!
(This poster has been silenced . There is nothing to see here. Return to your homes , and forget…forget…FORGET… Fnord)
With magic, you can turn a frog into a prince. With science, you can turn a frog into a Ph.D, and you still have the frog you started with.
The phrase derives from old English (or “ye olde Engish”). A “Yeard” was what we call a month now, a “small year”. A woman who went to full term in a pregnancy went the “whole nine Yeards”. If she had a preemie of course she did not and was said to have “dropped the bairn” (bairn being the old word for child), which of course mutated into our current “dropped the ball” for someone who messes up.
Wasn’t there a method used by medeval midwives to prevent premature birth? I believe they encouraged the mother to do muscle exercises that caused the fetus to move upward, back into the womb. This, of course, was known as a “bairn raising”.
