Subject: More pork, poor Will?

From: Pierre Abbat <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 18:04:58 -0500

Cote's Creole Creations eases ahead of the Elliott Morepork School of Design
to win first prize in the competition! The prize will be an antique
Lehman's frogmouth nightjar.

morepork (interj) - (Creole) expression indicating objection
(corruption of French "Mais, pourquoi?").
by Jean-Joseph Cote. 8.1 points
.1 for guess
2 for owl
Ranjit: Clever!  1 pt.
Aussie: 1 point.  At least it's an attempt.  I was thinking of doing the same
bit in Tex-Mex, myself.
MyS:  2 points for brilliance, but I suspect it's a trap
EZ: Hmmmm, with some reservation, 2 points.  If
it's not right, the person who came up with this
deserves it, for creativity.

morepork, n. The name of a school of design, influential in Europe and
North America in the 1920s, which rejected both esthetics and
functionality in favor of bulk.
by Elliott Moreton. 6 points
2 for owl
Ranjit: 2 points.  I have seen some examples of their legacy in
London and Washington, D.C.
Aussie: 2 Points.Yhis is what it should be, in a right-thinking world.  I'd
gladly go down to IKEA and furnish my home in a suite of Morepork.
MyS: If Fran is playing, I suspect her.  If not, I take it back.
JJ: Utterly implausible, but a great bit of whimsy.

morepork - n. - A braided beard.
by Ranjit Bhatnagar. 5 points
David: 1 point
Elliot: 1 pt.
After (Union) General Ambrose Morepork, hero of the Battle of French
Junction, who wore his beard pigtailed as a publicity gimmick to make
himself easy for cartoonists to caricature.  He was recognized and shot
dead by a sniper near Helena, Arkansas, in 1863.
Hutch: Don't know why, but I like this one. 2 points
JJ: So I have to pick one of those for the single point, huh?  I'll give it
to the beard.

morepork -- (n.) An Australian owl, Ninox boobook; also applied to the owl
Spiloglaux novaezeelandiae and, erroneously, to a frogmouth nightjar
or podargue
by Oxford and Grzimek. 5 points
Laura: is the australian owl david randall's? one point
Elliott: The real one.  Probably its call sounds like "morepork".    2 points.  I
love the idea of a "frogmouth nightjar" -- bet they really existed before
the advent of plumbing, and were sold by the millions through the kind of
catalog that offers toilet paper with large-denomination bills printed on
it, or salt and pepper shakers molded to look like Grandma and Grandpa.
EZ: I will risk a 0.1 point that this is the
inestimable D. Randall.
JJ: Yeah, birds often have weird nicknames like this, sometimes based on
their call, sometimes for other reasons.  Two points.

morepork - n. - a sack of ballast on a hot-air balloon
by Melissa Shaner. 3 points
David: 2 points
Elliott: After Jean-Phillippe Moreporc (1843-1870), Minister for Public
Enlightenment in the French Third Republic, who stowed away on the
balloon in which President Leon Gambetta escaped from the siege of
Paris.  The balloon got nowhere until Moreporc was discovered and
precipitated from it.
EZ: 1 point.

morepork, n. the pins used to stabilize a western-style scaffolding
by Aussie Meyer. 2 points
Laura: correct definition "the pins?" 2 points
MyS: Can one have a scaffolding?  Kind of like a shrubbery?

morepork - n. - gallows-rope
by David Randall. 2 points
Elliot: After Samuel Morepork (1707-1785), of Portsmouth, purveyor of rope to the
Royal Navy, whose advertisement of himself as "Rope-maker by Appointment
to His Majesty the King" was frequently misunderstood.
MyS: 1 point, although I'd think I've read enough Victorian fiction to have come
across this
Hutch: Gotta make another guess: 1 point

1-noun-Webster's : political demand
2-noun-OED oblique reference to gout-afflicted
3-noun-Dickens-Oliver couldn't have any
by Laura Randall. 0.9 point
1 for owl
-.1 for guess
EZ: What's with this?  Rejected out of hand on
basis of the Weird Factor.
JJ: I'll bet this is Laura.

morepork (n) Human flesh intended for consumption by cannibals.
(poss. from "long pig")
by Eric Zuckerman. -0.1 point
-.1 for guess
Elliott: What *is* the origin of the term "long pig"?  Did anyone ever really use
it, or was it made up for some movie?  The OED is most unsatisfactory on
this point:  "a transl. of a cannibal's name for human flesh; also
attrib;", with no date or quotation.
(Translation of "puaka enata" from some Polynesian language. -phma)
Hutch: Oogly! ... Say, I'm hungry.
JJ: Only problem with this is that the two English words here come from
different languages, I think, so the coiner would have an unlikely
linguistic background.
phma: The strong, soylent type.

Jean-Joseph also found the following passage in Finnegans Wake:

    When lo (whish, O whish!) mesaw mestreamed, as the green to the gred
was flew, was flown, through deafths of durkness greengrown deeper I
heard a voice, the voce of Shaun, vote of the Irish, voise from afar (and
cert no purer puer palestrine e'er chanted panangelical mid the clouds of
Tu es Petrus, not Michaeleen Kelly, not Mara O'Mario, and sure, what more
numerose Italicuss ever rawsucked frish uov in urinal?), a brieze to
Yverzone o'er the brozaozaozing sea, from Inchigeela call the way how it
suspired (morepork! morepork!) to scented nightlife as softly as the
loftly marconimasts from Clifden sough open tireless secrets (mauveport!
mauveport!) to Nova Scotia's listing sisterwands. Tubetube!

I think "morepork! morepork!" is either NN or C. NN is more likely because
it's the capital of Ireland.

Nightjars still exist; go out in the woods at night and you can hear them
saying that now that William, who never had much money, has been flagellated
to death, his wife should marry Charles. Meanwhile, another tattletale
charges Katherine with the murder.

As far as I can tell from Dr. Bernhard Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia,
the Australian and New Zealot (?) species are the same, Ninox novaeseelandiae
boobook. There is no genus Spiloglaux listed in Strigiformes. Morepork is
listed, oddly, not in Strigiformes, but in Caprimulgiformes, or goatsuckers
(so called from an ancient misconception that they milk goats), where he
states that the podargue is called the morepork erroneously because it says
"kom-kom-kom".

phma