From: Loki100l00@aol.com
Date: Wed Jan 30 2002 - 23:23:46 MST
Perhaps if we had to literally pay for it we would put it to better use than
this. But I guess until someone actually coughs up the dough, feel free to
spew away.
> [Mermaid 1* serves Trivia]:'i dont give a damn' or 'i dont care a damn' has
> undisputed Indian origins. During the pre-independence time, the 'dam' was
> the coin of the lowest denomination and hence the currency of least value<a
> copper coin which was valued at 1/1600th of a rupee>. The Duke of
> Wellington, a capable general but a snobbish English<Irish??> man, is
> credited with the invention of, "I dont care a two penny dam". Upon his
> return to England, he modified it to a form that will be more easily
> understood by the native english populace. "I dont give a two penny damn."
>
> [Hermit 2] Mermaid proves herself to be as reliable as ever when making
> claims about the South Asian subcontinent and what we should attribute to
> it. The Romans already used "Mea nil refert" in 72 BCE ("It makes no
> difference to me at all" - with the use of the genitive yielding a very
> sneering tone. And by the 1400s the English used "I give not a tinker's dam"
> (which is frequently explained as referencing the disposable clay dam used
> for collecting solder around repair work), but looking at other
> contemporaneous curses, e.g. "a pox on your dam", I suggest that this is
> incorrect. The etymology is, I think, "I don't give a tinkers mother" (i.e.
> A tinker's mother is worthless). An alternative and plausible etymology
> suggests that a tinker's damnation was damn near worthless, but the early
> spelling was "dam" at a time when "damn" was already in common use. By the
> 16th century this had been confabulated with "damnation" to yield "I don't
> care a damn" (i.e. I don't care enough about [i]you[/i] to bother damning
> you). This was because damning people was a rather popular pastime for the
> upper crust as in:
> [quote]Heaven grant him now some noble nook,
> For, rest his soul! he’d rather be
> Genteelly damn’d beside a Duke,
> Than sav’d in vulgar company.[/quote]
> Thomas Moore (1779–1852), Irish poet. “Epitaph on a Tuft-Hunter.”
> [Hermit 2] It was only in the mid 1800s (early 1840s as I recall, but it is
> out of period for me and only a vague memory, perhaps from one of the alt
> groups) that this transformed to "I don't give a damn" - as in [quote]I
> don't give a damn for your loyal service when you think I am right; when I
> really want it most is when you think I am wrong.[/quote] General John
> Monash, 1865-1931, attr,. in Colin MacInnes, England, Half English, 'Joshua
> Reborn'
> [Hermit 2] The original is not entirely lost.
> [quote]History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want
> tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth
> a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.[/quote]
> Henry Ford (1863–1947), U.S. industrialist. Interview in Chicago Tribune
> (1916-05-25).
>
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