8” label you sometimes find in the pocket of your new jacket.
Although it is our experience that most of the MPLSM codes are red, a casual glance at our voluminous mail indicates that brown and purple are popular, too. Frank P. Brennan, Jr., general manager of media relations for the USPS, says that each tour or shift has its own color.
Not every letter is processed by a MPLSM; increasingly, the USPS is relying on optical scanners. Scanners may be faster than MPLSMs, but without that red code, they can’t be held as accountable as MPLSMs when they screw up, either.
Why Do Owners or Handlers Use the Word “Sic” to Instruct a Dog to “Get Him”?
Dog World magazine was kind enough to print our query about this Imponderable in their June 1990 issue. We were soon inundated with letters from dog lovers, the most comprehensive of which came from Fred Lanting, of the German Shepherd Dog Club of America:
The command “sic” comes from a corruption of the German word such , which means to seek or search. It is used by Schutzhund [guardian and protection] and police trainers as well as by people training dogs for tracking. If the command “sic” is issued, it means that the dog is to find the hidden perpetrator or victim. In German, sic is pronounced “sook” or “suk,” but like many foreign words, the pronunciation has been altered over time by those not familiar with the language.
“Sic” has developed from [what was originally] a command to find a hidden bad guy, who [in training exercises] is usually covered by a box or hiding in an open pyramidal canvas blind. Because in police and Schutzhund training the bad guy is attacked if he tries to hit the dog or run away, the word has become associated with a command to attack.
Lanting’s answer brings up another Imponderable: If “sic” is a misspelling of the German word, should it be printed as “‘sic’ ( sic )”?
Submitted by Annie Lloyd of Merced, California .
In Baseball Scoring, Why Is the Letter “K” Chosen to Designate a Strikeout?
Lloyd Johnson, ex-executive director of the Society for American Baseball Research, led us to the earliest written source for this story, Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player , a manual published in 1867 that explained how to set up a baseball club. Included in Beadle’s are such quaint by-laws as “Any member who shall use profane language, either at a meeting of the club, or during field exercise, shall be fined—cents.”
A chapter on scoring, written by Henry Chadwick, assigns meaning to ten letters:
A for first base
B for second base
C for third base
H for home base
F for catch on the fly
D for catch on the bound
L for foul balls
T for tips
K for struck out
R for run out between bases
Chadwick advocated doubling up these letters to describe more events:
H R for home runs
L F for foul ball on the fly
T F for tip on the fly
T D for tip on the bound
He recognized the difficulty in remembering some of these abbreviations and attempted to explain the logic:
The above, at first sight, would appear to be a complicated alphabet to remember, but when the key is applied it will be at once seen that a boy could easily impress it on his memory in a few minutes. The explanation is simply this—we use the first letter in the words, Home, Fly, and Tip and the last in Bound, Foul, and Struck, and the first three letters of the alphabet for the first three bases.
We can understand why the last letters in “Bound” and “Foul” were chosen—the first letters of each were already assigned a different meaning—but we can’t figure out why “S” couldn’t have stood for struck out.
Some baseball sources have indicated that the “S” was already “taken” by the sacrifice, but we have no evidence to confirm that sacrifices were noted in baseball scoring as far back as the 1860s.
Submitted by Darin Marrs of Keller, Texas
Although it is our experience that most of the MPLSM codes are red, a casual glance at our voluminous mail indicates that brown and purple are popular, too. Frank P. Brennan, Jr., general manager of media relations for the USPS, says that each tour or shift has its own color.
Not every letter is processed by a MPLSM; increasingly, the USPS is relying on optical scanners. Scanners may be faster than MPLSMs, but without that red code, they can’t be held as accountable as MPLSMs when they screw up, either.
Why Do Owners or Handlers Use the Word “Sic” to Instruct a Dog to “Get Him”?
Dog World magazine was kind enough to print our query about this Imponderable in their June 1990 issue. We were soon inundated with letters from dog lovers, the most comprehensive of which came from Fred Lanting, of the German Shepherd Dog Club of America:
The command “sic” comes from a corruption of the German word such , which means to seek or search. It is used by Schutzhund [guardian and protection] and police trainers as well as by people training dogs for tracking. If the command “sic” is issued, it means that the dog is to find the hidden perpetrator or victim. In German, sic is pronounced “sook” or “suk,” but like many foreign words, the pronunciation has been altered over time by those not familiar with the language.
“Sic” has developed from [what was originally] a command to find a hidden bad guy, who [in training exercises] is usually covered by a box or hiding in an open pyramidal canvas blind. Because in police and Schutzhund training the bad guy is attacked if he tries to hit the dog or run away, the word has become associated with a command to attack.
Lanting’s answer brings up another Imponderable: If “sic” is a misspelling of the German word, should it be printed as “‘sic’ ( sic )”?
Submitted by Annie Lloyd of Merced, California .
In Baseball Scoring, Why Is the Letter “K” Chosen to Designate a Strikeout?
Lloyd Johnson, ex-executive director of the Society for American Baseball Research, led us to the earliest written source for this story, Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player , a manual published in 1867 that explained how to set up a baseball club. Included in Beadle’s are such quaint by-laws as “Any member who shall use profane language, either at a meeting of the club, or during field exercise, shall be fined—cents.”
A chapter on scoring, written by Henry Chadwick, assigns meaning to ten letters:
A for first base
B for second base
C for third base
H for home base
F for catch on the fly
D for catch on the bound
L for foul balls
T for tips
K for struck out
R for run out between bases
Chadwick advocated doubling up these letters to describe more events:
H R for home runs
L F for foul ball on the fly
T F for tip on the fly
T D for tip on the bound
He recognized the difficulty in remembering some of these abbreviations and attempted to explain the logic:
The above, at first sight, would appear to be a complicated alphabet to remember, but when the key is applied it will be at once seen that a boy could easily impress it on his memory in a few minutes. The explanation is simply this—we use the first letter in the words, Home, Fly, and Tip and the last in Bound, Foul, and Struck, and the first three letters of the alphabet for the first three bases.
We can understand why the last letters in “Bound” and “Foul” were chosen—the first letters of each were already assigned a different meaning—but we can’t figure out why “S” couldn’t have stood for struck out.
Some baseball sources have indicated that the “S” was already “taken” by the sacrifice, but we have no evidence to confirm that sacrifices were noted in baseball scoring as far back as the 1860s.
Submitted by Darin Marrs of Keller, Texas
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