Of Crackpots and The Election

Let's see....we wanted Republicans, then we wanted Democrats, now we want Republicans again, "sort of." The GOP took control of the House of Representatives the other night, and made gains in the Senate. About the only positive things Democrats could point to was that they held onto the Senate, and that they prevented some real crackpots from entering that legislative body to join the likes of Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, who will sorely miss Sharron Angle* and Christine O'Donnell.** If DeMint ever gets his way, we'll nearly all undoubtedly be driving around in chariots and heading home to cook our rationed food on stones located just outside our tents. The privileged few, the business class, will still have their mansions and they'll dispatch their underlings to escort the rest of us to our tasks building real pyramids (not like the Wall Street types; "pyramid schemes"), on a daily basis, and I do mean DAILY, but there won't be any calendars, because I'm sure DeMint and his bunch don't believe the Earth revolves around the Sun. If you have some medical condition that could possibly be helped by "science," forget it! No need for scientists, because thinking will be considered to be dangerous, not that they don't already believe that now. Everyone will be mandated to watch two hours of propaganda...I mean "news," on Fox News at local coliseums. Oh, and one more thing, there will be no need for real elections, since Fox will tell us every day how well off we are, and how the "natural state of affairs in a free market system" is for the very few to own society, while everyone else has been born to serve those few. Anyone who disagrees will have to stand before the one and only Supreme Court justice, Christine O'Donnell, who, with broom in hand, will ask no questions, but with a wiggle of her nose will dispatch that person to....ah.....POOF!

(Before I got "poofed," I did a Word History below the notes. Let's see...how do I get back now? I knew I should have watched "Bewitched" more often!)

* Sharron Angle, GOP senatorial candidate in Nevada, bluntly said that she would not talk to reporters, that she would only answer questions AFTER she was a senator (there's a vote for democracy), and that she would only appear on "Fox News," that bastion of "fair and balanced," whose owner contributed at least a cool million to the GOP in the recent elections. If ANY OTHER news organization, the so called "liberal media," had contributed to Democrats, the people at Fox would have landed in your laps after jumping through your television screens. And there would be no more Rush Limbaugh, because he would have most certainly had a stroke.

** Christine O'Donnell, the GOP senatorial candidate in Delaware, was the first woman since circa 1675 to declare "I'm not a witch." Unlike the women of times long passed, O'Donnell actually said it in a television ad, also saying, "I'm you. I''ll go to Washington and do what you would do." My question is, what would "you" do, since in a country like ours, we don't all hold the same opinions, so just what "you" is she talking about? Further, she said that she wanted to "follow the Constitution," but when asked what Supreme Court decisions she disagreed with, she couldn't do it.

WORD HISTORY:
Hex-Really two words in one, today. Presently, the ultimate origin of this word remains unknown. It traces back to West Germanic (English is a West Germanic language) and possibly to Old Germanic "hagatusjo(n)," having some meaning to do with "hedges," as the first part "haga," referred to "hedges, bushes," and indeed it is the ancestor of our modern word "hedge," and German "Hag" (not pronounced as our same word), which also means "hedge," and also is the "haw" part of "hawthorne," a tree that was seemingly common in pagan Germanic rituals. It is speculated by some linguists that the planting of these trees close together to form "hedgerows" to "fence in" old Germanic settlements may have given pagan beliefs the idea of "hedge riders;" that is, women with special powers who straddled "civilization" and the wild beyond, and that this gradually evolved into our more modern "witches riding brooms." Anyway, the West Germanic form gave Old English "haegtesse," meaning "witch," and this was shortened during the 1200s to just "hag," which also came to mean "ugly old woman," rather than just "witch." "Hex," the verb form ("to hex someone"), came to English in the 1800s from Pennsylvania German (commonly, but incorrectly, also known as "Pennsylvania Dutch"), a dialect (which used "Deitsch and "Duutsch" for their speech) brought to America by German immigrants, many of them from the Palatinate region of Germany. It is related to "hag." The Old Germanic form mentioned above gave Old High German "hagazuzza/hagazussa" meaning "witch," and later this became "hecse/hexse" in German, before becoming modern German "Hexe," meaning "a witch." The verb form became "hexen," in German," and the shortened form was passed onto English. "Supposedly," the noun form in English, "a hex," didn't develop until the early 1900s. By the way, the word "hex," used for a six-sided shape is not the same word, but rather simply a shortened form of "hexagon."