26Aug August 26, 2006 – Provender
It’s just not fair.
provender \PROV-uhn-duhr\, noun:
1. Dry food for domestic animals, such as hay, straw, corn, oats, or a mixture of ground grain; feed.
2. Food or provisions.
It turns out that he and thousands of other German immigrants have been acting as pre-invasion intelligence-gatherers, ensuring that “the German Army knew almost to a bale of hay what provender lay between London and the coast.”
— Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War
Frances Trollope, Captain Marryat, Colonel Basil Hall and Charles Dickens in 1842 all commented on the way Americans wolfed down their provender as fast as possible, cramming the cornbread in their sloppy maws and, worse, doing so in grim silence, punctuated only by the noise of slurps, grunts; scraping knives and hacking coughs.
— Simon Schama, “Them and US”, The Guardian, March 29, 2003
Provender comes from Old French, from Late Latin praebenda (prae and pro being confused), “a daily allowance of provisions,” from praebere, contraction of praehibere, “to hold forth, to offer, to afford,” from prae-, “before” + habere, “to have, to hold.”
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for provender
This really isn’t fair. Two no-tubers in a row. Google’s also useless. That Video Site? “No Results Yielded” Nothing on bolt.com or Zippy.com, which I suppose is just as well since this is supposed to be TUBE of the day, not Zippy of the Day or Bolt of the day. Sigh. OK, Robin, to the Thesaurus! OK, nevermind. Thesauri suck. Back to the FWFSW/FWSSW rule I suppose, which today gives us “dry food” and “food.” Yikes. I don’t think I am going to like this. Well, they can’t all be gems. I am going to make an executive decision and replace the FWFSW with “fodder” as I feel that is a decent substitute and because the two FW’s are essentially the same.
Let’s go then.
“Fodder:” Oh. Dear. God. I think I should have chosen a different synonym. Fodder just has too many uses, but I made the decision, so I will stick with it. Sigh. Put on your tinfoil hats for this one. This dude’s serious. Check out the right hand column on the actual YouTube site to see more of this whackjobs fruitcake ideas.
The Truth Starts Here! *cough, cough*
Okay, that’s done. As broad as this may be, now for “Food:”
Oh. Dear. God. Again.
As one commenter said, “Beware the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse….they will come in a form unexpected….” You will be singing this all day long. I don’t know where it is from (aside from being British), or why they have stained my computer so, but now they have you too. I’m sorry – if I don’t pass it along a creepy technicolor girl will climb through my monitor seven days from now.
It’s here. (Bonus: I’m not sure if this is better or worse.)
Please be a normal word tomorrow. This might be a very bad experiment.