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… because* …

*make sure you read the fine print 😛

So this one has been bugging me for more than a few weeks now, and I’ve asked Sam a couple of times, why it is we say “move along at a decent clip”. What does it mean? What’s a decent clip? What is a clip?!@ The first thing that comes to mind is the fast ship from the 1800s called the “clipper”, so I always felt that this version of the noun “clip” had a kind of nautical nature to it. It turns out I wasn’t too far off the mark.

For myself, “moving along at a clip” evokes a kind of.. smooth, continuous rapid movement imagery in my head, like a ship cutting through the water or a galloping horse. The other common “clip” nouns include the attaching kind (paper clip) and the movie kind (movie clip). It also used to describe a hug, a blow (like a punch) and a number of other things, but now we’re getting off topic.

A few weeks ago, an initial search for “moving along at a decent clip, phrase, origin” in google turned up nothing, and I promptly gave up. Today I decided to try again, and this time was a bit smarter and looked up the definition of the word. The first few definitions just said that it was slang and informal, but eventually I found this, which gave a bit more clue to it’s origin:

clip (1)
“cut,” c.1200, from O.N. klippa, probably echoic. Meaning “rate of speed is c.1867. Noun meaning “extract from a movie” is from 1958.

I wasn’t sure what O.N. stood for, but after moving from dictionaries to etymology I found that clip came from:

Middle English clippen, from Old Norse klippa.

Ah ha! O.N. Old Norse! I originally looked for it in latin, greek and swedish (since Klippa sounds like somethign from IKEA) but now I was onto something. Eventually I stumbled onto www.word-detective.com and a post back in 2006 which says:

The other kind of “clip,” meaning “to cut,” appeared in English around 1200, derived from the Old Norse “klippa,” probably an echoic formation (meaning that the word imitated the sharp, sudden sound of something “clipping”). This “clip” developed a variety of derivative meanings, including “to form or mark by clipping” (as hedges are clipped), “to cut short or diminish” (as budgets are “clipped”), to cheat or swindle, and, in the 19th century, “to move or run quickly” (giving us, in noun form, “at a good clip” as well as swift “clipper” ships). This use evidently derives from the notion of “cutting short” the time taken. One of the more recently developed senses of “clip” is “an extract from a motion picture,” which appeared around 1958.

I also found out the below, that the ship was named after the horse, which comes from clippen, meaning to “shorten” which in turn may have been influenced from the Middle Dutch word klepper.

c.1330, from clippen “shorten,” perhaps infl. by M.Du. klepper “swift horse,” echoic. The type of fast sailing ship so called from 1830, from clip (1) in alternate sense of “to move or run rapidly.

Suffice to say, the origin is something along the lines of the time taken to travel has been cut / clipped short and somehow been transformed into a noun along the way.

I’ve created a new category, under which my Cara Cara post and this now fall, it’s just about random stuff I end up looking up after reading or hearing something and thinking to myself “hmm?”

Anyway, I was reading this article about a man who dies while the ambulance is staging. Even though the article explains it, I looked it up.

After a bit of poking around I found this article.

Preventing Close Calls: Staging
The principle of staging is to keep EMS providers safe until police secure a violent or potentially violent scene.

When staging:

1. Park out of view of the scene.
2. Leave yourself a buffer—, generally at least a block or two, —especially with calls involving street violence when a perpetrator may be mobile (by automobile or on foot) in the area. Your rig could be attractive to anyone looking to hide or make a fast escape.
3. Only respond to the scene when police have reported it secure. If the dispatcher tells you “Police are on scene,” confirm that they have things under control.
4. There are times when you will have to retreat from a scene that suddenly becomes dangerous. In these cases, use the same principles. Notify police about the situation and move a safe distance away. Be sure you are out of sight and out of range for anyone leaving the scene.

So, this is filed under miscellaneous, but if there were an even more random category, it would fall under that.

It was a blustery evening after work, a little above freezing and since the days are still short, dark. The air was chill and unmistakably damp, all around rather unpleasant. I rushed across the parking lot, the ground black and glistening from melted snow. I strode briskly through the sliding doors and the anarchy that is T&T washed across me in a roar of chinese and checkout scanning blips. A crotchety old chinese man returned the frozen halibut that scanned in higher than he expected, a young couple filling in their lucky draw slips, giggling at some private exchange.

I flew through the aisles, one arm juggling a basket and phone, the other pulling items off the shelves in a flurry. Before long I came upon the produce section and scanned over the area. Eyes passed over piles of fruit and short chinese people alike, scanning for the most attractive looking fruity goodness. Winter. Winter is all about navel oranges, isn’t it? I quickly navigated the carts and rolling baskets to the oranges.

The oranges looked pretty good, fairly large and juicy, and ripe for the most part. I began to sift through the oranges at random, gauging colour and size, mentally measuring roundness while hefting them in hand to estimate juice-factor. After subconsciously calculating using a random formula of these most important properties, I began to bag orange after orange. As I continued, my eyes wandered their way over to the adjacent fruit. More oranges, at first glance seeming identical to the ones I was currently elbow deep in.

But wait! what was this!

These newly discovered oranges were $1.40 a pound! Almost double the price of the heap in front of me. My curiosity was instantly sparked at the fact that these near identical oranges were close to twice the price. The orange I was holding in my hand had dropped, forgotten, and the remaining Sunkist navel oranges in my bag now appeared pale, dry, and lifeless.

[.. to be continued ..]

Anyhow.. not wanting to expend all the energy finishing this, I bought some Cara Cara oranges and they turned out to be pink inside, almost like a grapefruit. They also have a very interesting taste which is, while distinctively orange, also distinctively not. It’s like one of those Tropicana orange juice mixes, but in a fruit.