" Ah, but the servant waits, while the *master* baits! "
Posted on 08/31/2011 9:08:15 AM PDT by markomalley
A developing story for you out of Scott Air Force Base, where emergency crews are dealing with a reported hazmat situation.
“Currently we’re responding to a suspicious package that occurred at the official mail center (Building 1650),” SAFB spokesman Lt. Benjamin Garland tells KMOX News.
He said they’re not releasing any further information about the “suspicious package” or what it may have contained at this time.
Early word from the scene is that at least 3 people have been transported to the hospital and a dozen more need decontamination.
KMOX has received some reports that the hazmat emergency stemmed from a suspicious package sent to the base, that gave handlers a rash.
The incident began just before 9:30 a.m. Wednesday.
The education center, the bowling alley and ITT center at Scott are closed until further notice.
Check back for more on this developing story.
bttt
Baited breath became popular about the same time sushi did...
Gave handlers a rash ... How? Have others been exposed along the route of the package? Very little information in the article.
[ Baited breath became popular about the same time sushi did... ]
Liberals love sushi, your point?
sushi, raw fish, bait...
I know I should have used Bated, but I was having fun using Baited.
Playing with words is fun, no de-bait on that...
1974 Communications Group, 1976-1979. Met my lovely wife while stationed at Scott. Pretty good base but hard to find a parking space at the exchange or commissary; too many Colonels and Chiefs.
Now that's funny! Quick too...
Regards,
GtG
Scott AFB?
When I hear the base mentioned, I recall the movie “An Affair to Remember” playing in a Belleville theater, John Unitas in the greatest game, “You ain’t nothing but a hounddog” by Elvis just came out, a new beer had been born in St. Louis — Busch Bavarian and a floating gambling casino moored under the bridge and driving through E. St Louis with a cocked 1911 on the passenger seat of my 1953 Buick Dynaflow.
Them were heady days.
those are quite the memories 8^)
" Ah, but the servant waits, while the *master* baits! "
The whole thing smells fishy to me.....
Getting back to the original post; Any further news about what happened at Scott Air force base?
houeto: Harry Potter uses “baited’. Shakespeare goes with ‘bated’. You’re in with the more classical and literate people of freerepublic... Me? Not so much...
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http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/bated-breath.html
Which is it - bated or baited? We have baited hooks and baited traps, but bated - what’s that? Bated doesn’t even seem to be a real word, where else do you hear it? Having said that, ‘baited breath’ makes little sense either. How can breath be baited? With worms?
There seems little guidance in contemporary texts. Search in Google and you’ll find about the same number of hits for ‘baited breath’ as ‘bated breath’. In one of the best selling books of all time - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, (whose publisher could surely have afforded the services of a proof-reader), we have:
“The whole common room listened with baited breath.”
As so often, help is found in the writings of the Bard. The earliest known citation of the phrase is from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, 1596:
What should I say to you? Should I not say
‘Hath a dog money? is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ Or
Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key,
With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this;
‘Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last;
You spurn’d me such a day; another time
You call’d me dog; and for these courtesies
I’ll lend you thus much moneys’?
Bated is just a shortened form of abated (meaning - to bring down, lower or depress). ‘Abated breath’ makes perfect sense and that’s where the phrase comes from.
Geoffrey Taylor, in his little poem Cruel, Clever Cat, 1933, used the confusion over the word to good comic effect:
Sally, having swallowed cheese
Directs down holes the scented breeze
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.
That part of the country is just flush with the Amish. I would start looking there.
In court, in the olden days, “He plead guilty.”
Now its “he pleaded guilty.”
It just doesn’t roll off the tongue the way it used to.
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