I notice in reports that spokesmen hint and suggest that it might not be Deryk Schlessinger’s MySpace page. But nobody has ever flatly denied it.
Odd bit of local trivia.
This expression originated with British soldiers stationed on Telegraph Island, a small (1 acre?) bump of land in a fjord on the Musandam Peninsula in Oman. The isolation and stillness is quite remarkable and they went a bit insane, thus “going around the bend”.
As far as I know, Dr. Laura can’t be heard in Oman.
Can you imagine being the Omanian whose fillings pick up THAT bit of shrillery?
Cite? This sounds like an etymological legend to me. OED just quotes “an old naval term” from 1929; an article by Alex Leff in the History of Psychiatry says it’s a 19th-century sailors’ term, from the specialized use of bend meaning “knot.” Both prefer “round the bend” to “around the bend.”
Either way, Dr. Laura is definitely nuts, or evil, or both.
If she’s all about tradition -bible etc. why does her son have her maiden name as his surname instead of his bio-dads?
The phrase was coined in the 1860s when the British sought a safe location for the telegraph cable from India to Britain. It is quite common knowledge in the region… looking for a few cites/references.
“The phrase “round the bend” was coined here by the 19th-century Brits who spent years laying a telegraph cable, living on a rocky islet known as Telegraph Island. The phrase has its origins in the expats’ isolation – or in the path of the cable around the peninsula; either way, this place induces a rare, soul-silencing stillness.”
But O’R at least didn’t really quite get all the way to wackville until the early 2000’s, when he truly acquired national “mainstream” visibility. IMO it could be more a question that their early work garnered a reasonably positive response, and either they read that as meaning that they’d get an even better response by going even further, or they read that as meaning that if they were right about the one thing, they must be right about everything.
As of the last time I checked out what was up with that show, “Dr. Laura” does a very interesting thing , to which MGibson has alluded: a large number of her callers bring up issues or problems that a non-radical reasonable person in the audience **could ** still respond to with: “Well, you should have thought of that BEFORE you went ahead and did it!”. She then does her schtick of answering like she has access to some higher pool of knowledge of right v. wrong. But here’s the really neat part: sometimes, by the sounds of the caller and their reactions, *you can TELL * that they expect her to ream them out over what they’re doing wrong or failing to do right; it’s like they KNOW what’s going to be the answer, BUT they so distrust their own judgement that they need some sort of external authority to tell them what to do. (Either that, or it’s a visit to the Emotional S&M parlor, to be told they’re naughty boys and need a whipping, to enjoy the humiliation).
As opposed to being a far left-wing idiot of course?
Eh. There are a couple of those. Not near as many, of course…
There’s probably as many, but there’s no audience for them.