The seventh inning stretch is a time-honored baseball custom in which the fans ritualistically stand and stretch before their team comes to bat in the seventh inning.  This is done not only to relieve stiff muscles due to sitting the previous six innings, but perhaps also to bring luck to one’s team (an association with the number 7 and good luck, maybe?).  Unfortunately the exact origin of the custom is lost in the earliest days of the game.  Baseball historian Dan Daniel is quoted by Zander Hollander (Baseball Lingo, 1967):  “It probably originated as an expression of fatigue and tedium, which seems to explain why the stretch comes late in the game instead of at the halfway point.”  The earliest reference that has surfaced appears in an 1869 letter from Harry Wright of the Cincinnati Red Stock­ings to a friend:  “The spectators all arise between halves of the seventh inning, extend their legs and arms and some­times walk about.  In so doing, they enjoy the relief afforded by relaxation from a long posture upon hard benches.”  The most popular story of its origin is also the most col­orful.  It was created in 1910 when President William Howard Taft, on a visit to Pittsburgh, went to a baseball game and stood up to stretch in the seventh inning.  The crowd, thinking the chief executive was about to leave, stood up out of respect for the office.  The term itself can be traced back no further than 1920.  https://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2008/html/pb22235/html/kit_004.html

rinky-dink(adj.)  "trivial, old-fashioned, worthless," 1913 (from 1912 as a noun, "antiquated or worthless object"), said to be carnival slang and imitative of the sound of banjo music at parades [Barnhart]; compare ricky-tick "old-fashioned jazz" (1938).  But early records suggest otherwise unless there are two words.  The earliest senses seem to be as a noun, "maltreatment," especially robbery.  https://www.etymonline.com/word/rinky-dink 

 

Leslie Claire Margaret Caron (born 1 July 1931) is a French and American actress and dancer.  She is the recipient of a Golden Globe Award, two BAFTA Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards.  Caron began her career as a ballerina.  She made her film debut in the musical An American in Paris (1951), followed by roles in The Man with a Cloak (1951), Glory Alley (1952) and The Story of Three Loves (1953), before her role of an orphan in Lili (also 1953), which earned her the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress and garnered nominations for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Caron 

 

Just read an article on Substack (which does not allow you to forward articles) reporting that the Chicago Sun-Times published a summer reading list.  Ten of the fifteen titles were fake.  It seems that the compiler used AI to generate the list and did not bother to check or verify the results.  Also, your piece on Stone Soup put me in mind of a short novel by French author Hubert Mingarelli entitled “A Meal In Winter.”  It tells of three German soldiers in WWII who evade participating in a mass slaughter of Jews by scheming to be assigned to patrol the woods surrounding their camp to hunt more Jews.  In the dead of winter, they find a young Jewish man hiding in an improvised bunker and take him captive.  They then stop for a break in a derelict farmhouse and discuss how best to combine their resources to make a meal.  They are joined by a virulently anti-semitic Polish partisan.  Tensions rise and reach a boiling point when the Pole objects to sharing the food with a Jew.  He departs and the rest finish the meal.  The Germans then discuss whether they should let the Jew go free or return him to their camp to die in the next mass killing.  I think the story is an interesting variation of the Stone Soup legend.  Thank you, Muse reader. 

Halva (also halvah, halwa, halua, and other spellings; is a type of confectionery that is widely spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, Central Asia, and South Asia.  The name is used for a broad variety of recipes, generally a thick paste made from flour, butter, liquid oil, saffron, rosewater, milk, turmeric powder, and sweetened with sugar.  The word halva entered the English language between 1840 and 1850 from Romanian, which came from Ottoman Turkish.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halva  Thank you, reader.   

central casting (sen-truhl KAS-ting) 

   adjective:  Stereotypical.

   noun:  A company or department that provides actors for minor or

   background roles, often based on stereotypical appearances. 

[After Central Casting, a company founded in 1925 to cast actors for

minor roles in film and television.  Earliest documented use:  1941.]

Wordsmith  June 6, 2025   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2952  June 6, 2025