"duff"

"Duff" was originally an alternative pronunciation of "dough" (cf "enough").

So it also came to mean a kind of pudding, "plum duff". And hence you could be "up the duff" if you were pregnant, just as you might "have a bun in the oven".

From the sense of "dough" it also came to mean flour, and then to chaff, or useless stuff. Hence "duff" meaning useless or broken.

Disasters and retreats

I'm reading Orwell's essay "The Lion and the Unicorn", and this bit made me laugh out loud:

"English literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. Sir John Moore's army at Corunna, fighting a desperate rearguard action before escaping overseas (just like Dunkirk!) has more appeal than a brilliant victory. The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction."

horsewhipping for Jesus

On 23 January 1867, the Rev. Edward Dodd, a fellow of Magdalene College Cambridge and the vicar of St Giles' church, was caught and publicly horsewhipped by the Rev. J Sumner Brockhurst, of Emmanuel College, as Dodd was leaving formal hall. When asked by a court to explain his actions, Brockhurst said that Dodd had said grace without mentioning the name of Jesus, because a Jewish man was present, and that any reasonable person would have whipped Dodd under such provocation. The court did not agree.

The "Saturday Review" said that this was the result of "muscular Christianity". This was a movement among certain evangelicals at the time, who were worried that religion in general was losing its focus on Jesus by trying to be nice to everyone. (I suspect there was a fair amount of misogyny mixed in: trying to accommodate people was seen as womanly, weak, and unworthy of men.)

Article in the "Spectator": https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GU3hAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA124&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

Article in the "Saturday Review": https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Z9UcAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA142&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

dwim screenshots?

eftychia and azurelunatic: I'm making some mockup screenshots for dwim. Your posts "QoTD" and "Netflix and root beer" are the top two public posts on my read page. May I use the text of them in the screenshots?