Monday, October 14, 2019

2019 - Day 287/78 - Monday...Funambulism...

I made it to Phoenix...be here for several days. Got in to the office pretty early and did some power real estate, then off to the airport. Conducting business in the airport, in the bathroom (you guys have a dirty mind), in the restaurant, on the plane, in the Lyft...it was kind of a crazy day. Met some friends and we walked about thirty miles to a restaurant (all uphill). When we got the the restaurant, our table was 'downstairs,' and you could go down the stairs or down the slide. There was really no question about the path I would take, and here is the documentation of the event! It is warmish here, dry compared to Austin, the hotel has signs everywhere about water conservation, but the sprinklers have been running ever since I got here. Don't needlessly ask us to wash your towels, but by God the grass is going to be green!

Funambulism -- Noun. 1. tightrope walking. 2. a show especially of mental agility. As a game-show contestant, Brenda amazed us all with her funambulism, answering every question correctly to win the $20,000 first prize.

Did You Know? Back in ancient Rome, tightrope walking was a popular spectacle at public gatherings The Latin word for "tightrope walter" is funambulus, from the Latin funis, meaning "rope," plus ambulare, meaning "to walk." It doesn't take any funambulism on our part to see how the word for an impressive act of physical skill and agility came to mean an impressive act of mental skill or agility. That extended sense of word, describing acts of agility that are either impressive or occasionally horrific, has been around since at least 1886, when British academic and writer Augustus Jessopp described the act of diagramming sentences as "horrible lessons of ghastly grammar and dreary funambulism." I couldn't agree more, I was never good at diagramming sentences.

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