760-1: Feedback, notes and comments

Waiter's tip Following up my mention of this colloquial anatomical term, Jim Muller wrote, "When I was at medical school in Cape Town in the 60's and 70's the position of the hand in Erb's palsy was referred to as the 'policeman's tip' position. Perhaps we were more cynical about policemen in those days, and waiters did not have to expect backhanded tips."

Marcia Wilson mentioned another once-popular medical term, the Ford fracture, also called the backfire or chauffeur's fracture, which referred to a broken wrist or arm: "The Model T Ford had to be cranked by hand. Not only difficult, it could be frustrating and occasionally dangerous. If you didn't have all the settings in their proper place, the crank could spin in the wrong direction. It would fly back at high speed, connecting with the nearest part of your anatomy — usually the arm doing the winding."

Wildcats From Jascha Kessler: "Your discussion of wildcat banks in the 19th century reminded me, yet again, that things have changed: specie, as it was known, really is no more, and our coinage is base metals. Some folks tried to hold on, mainly in Nevada. In 1950, in Reno, we stopped for lunch at a casino, and when I asked the cashier for singles, wanting to break a $20 bill, she looked at me puzzled. 'Singles? What are they?' I said, being an Easterner, 'You know, dollars, dollar bills.' Astonished she replied, 'You mean paper money?' And in answer to my shrug, spilled out 20 silver dollars. Weighty specie ... the faintest memory in our time."

"I've also seen wildcat used in the context of rail lines," wrote Joe Orfant. "Outside of Boston, a rail line runs between the main, parallel lines to Lowell and Lawrence. I recall a trip to Lowell over thirty years ago when a frozen switch or some other problems caused our train to be sent up the Lawrence line around the problem to connect to the Lowell line via the seldom used 'wildcat spur'. I was surprised to see it recently on a map of the MBTA commuter rail system under that name".

Grammar puzzle A sentence in last week's Sic! column — "His eyes still shut, a dream dissolving and already impossible to recall, Hector's hand sluggishly reached across the bed." — was claimed to be ungrammatical. To the submitter and me the sentence seemed to suggest Hector's hand had eyes. This provoked responses from readers who believed the sentence was correct; a linguist, Arnold Zwicky, whom I asked about the matter, agreed with them, arguing that the initial "his" is exactly equivalent to "Hector's". You can see that most clearly if you invert the two: "Hector's eyes still shut ... his hand sluggishly reached across the bed." Despite that verdict, the sentence would have benefitted from recasting.

Corrections The Rutland Herald is published in Rutland, Vermont, not in Virginia as I had it last week. A comment last time implied that the European wild cat is a feral variety of the domestic feline; it's a separate species, of course.