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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (75834)	9/29/2003 10:53:10 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I don't recall ever seeing that expression before. While I could infer it's meaning from the context, I'm glad I supplemented that with a google because I found an interesting web site in the process. quinion.com --------------- BROWN STUDY From Ken Jaede: “I once read the expression brown study somewhere. I think it meant something like a morose mood or mental fog. Do you know the origin and true meaning of this expression?” Its first meaning in the language was indeed a state of gloomy meditation. These days it usually means a state of abstraction, absent-mindedness or deep thought. The expression is old, dating at least from the sixteenth century. We’ve now lost the original meanings of both halves of the phrase and so it has long since turned into an idiom. Brown does refer to the colour, but it seems that in the late medieval period it could also mean no more than dark or gloomy and it was then transferred figuratively to the mental state. A study at that time could be a state of reverie or abstraction, a sense of the word that is long since obsolete. The first example is a surprisingly modern-sounding bit of sage advice in a book called Dice-Play of 1532: “Lack of company will soon lead a man into a brown study”. World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–2003. All rights reserved. Contact the author for reproduction requests. Comments and feedback are always welcome. Page created 22 February 2003. ---------- Regarding the source of your "brown-study," as I acknowledged to Chris, I can imagine the confusion that might occur had one not realized what I was doing with my hypothetical. I worried that it was too obvious, but I guess we have some skimmers in the crowd. I do think that it was dramatically parallel in the half dozen key ways I specified, but I understand that if you're not looking for it, you may not see it, and if you didn't view the Mojo scenario as I did, my key parallels may not be the salient ones for you.