6 Slang Terms With Surprisingly Badass Origins

Meaning:

To take a dangerous risk, especially in conversation.

Used Today:

"You are REALLY pushing the envelope, trying to bone my sister!"

Used Originally:

"You are REALLY pushing the envelope, and as a result, a plane is going to explode."

You'd be forgiven for thinking that the "envelope" in question is a paper one, but you'd be wrong. It's mathematical.

Now, you may think that by adding math to an article that's already about words and history that we've officially thrown ourselves into a perfect storm of perpetual nerd virginity, but first hear us out. Mathematics is used to calculate a plane's limits in a construct called its "flight envelope." That is, the particular combination of speed, height, stress and other aeronautical factors that form the bounds of safe operation. Go beyond these limits, or "push" the "envelope," and you'll be dancing into the danger zone where the dancer becomes the dance, and the plane becomes a giant fireball.

Test pilots, of course, have to push the flight envelope all the time. By flying a plane beyond its mathematical limits, they can check that it'll be safe when flown within its limits and find out what parts might fail if the limits are pushed, all while running the risk of having the plane burst into flames. There's also the rarely spoken about unofficial risk of having the moon collide with the plane as a result of the strong, gravitational pull brought on by the pilot's massive, massive balls.

Unfortunately for our original smart Alec, he got a bit too clever. Instead of paying the crooked cops like a good honest man, he started to hide his plunder. Eventually, Hoag was busted and sent to jail where he met a wrongfully imprisoned newspaper editor named George Wilkes, who wrote his story down. The theory goes that either Wilkes or the police gave Hoag the nickname of "smart Alec" for being a clever thief who got too clever for his own good.

No, the "rail" in question was the kind one builds fences with. Essentially, a long bar of wood, often with not much care taken in its construction, so it had lots of lumps and strange angles. The offender would be forcibly seated on this bar of wood, or "rail" if you will, borne upon the shoulders of two men (often part of a large angry mob of some description) and carried to the edge of town.

Now, if you're thinking "oh, that doesn't sound too bad, sounds like rather a nice ride actually," well, you're forgetting two things:

1. You'd be straddling a large, bumpy, lumpy, probably splinter-covered piece of wood, being carried roughly out of town by two men who probably didn't care how much they jostled you. Meaning you'd be lucky to get out of it with any junk left (and God help you if they decided to get some drive-thru on the way).

2. At the end of the journey, you'd be unceremoniously dumped into a ditch, often with a liberal application of tar and feathers to emphasize the point, which would be exceptionally painful, permanently disfiguring and almost certainly fatal, depending how much the townspeople hated you.

So much.

The Book of Daniel tells the story of a Babylonian king called Belshazzar, who was just one sin-lovin' motherfucker. Loved sin, this guy. We could tell you some stories. One night, he gathered all his disreputable friends and threw a magnificent feast where, as was the custom at the time, they blasphemed, made offerings to heathen gods, danced to heavy metal and generally sinned like some kind of goddamn sin-fueled sin brigade at the sin Olympics. It was nuts.

In any case, the biggest heresy of all came when Belshazzar and his cronies drank from cups his predecessor Nebuchadnezzar had stolen from the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem. God's a lot of things, but he ain't no punk, and he was not about to stand for that shit. A disembodied hand appeared (presumably accompanied by some kickass guitar riffs) and began writing in glowing letters on the wall. All the wise men at the party gathered around and tried to figure out what they meant, but none of them could translate it.

Daniel was brought in, because this is sort of his thing, and told the king that the writing meant God was seriously pissed off. That very night, Belshazzar was killed and his kingdom swallowed up by Persia. The moral to this story: When a disembodied hand starts writing on the wall, you've fucked up royally.

Yes, a "blockbuster" was once a huge bomb, weighing up to 12,000-pounds, that was dropped by the British Royal Air Force on German cities, so named because they were large enough to bust a whole city block. The British used these to politely bomb the fuck out of Germany during World War II.

After the war, advertisers hijacked the term "blockbuster" to describe a huge movie. So the term now used to describe the Twilight movies used to once refer to a device that caused pain and misery to thousands of innocent civilians.

Not too much has changed, then.

To see more of JD Niemand's work, visit his webcomic at http://www.drunkduck.com/Stickman_and_Cube.

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For more help with your Wordly Wise vocab, check out 9 Words That Don't Mean What You Think and 8 Racist Words You Use Every Day.

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