What did Laughing Gas have to do with “Winning the West?” And what barnyard animal can learn its name and do tricks faster than your pet dog? Hear the answers on the Off Ramp with Bob & Marcia Smith.

Bob and Marcia Smith discussed the evolution of language, culture, and communication, delving into topics such as the origins and evolution of words and phrases, the significance of imagery and humor in storytelling, and the emergence of memes during the inauguration. They also explored the history and significance of Inaugural Addresses and Vice Presidency, sharing interesting facts and insights. Bob questioned the relevance of the term ‘second gentleman’ in modern times, while Marcia provided historical context and examples of its usage. Through their conversation, the speakers offered valuable insights into the evolution of language and its reflection of culture and communication.

Outline

Laughing gas, animal intelligence, and the term “gentleman”.

  • Pigs are smarter than dogs, learning names and tricks faster.
  • Marcia and Bob discuss the term “gentleman” and its history, with Bob sharing that it originated in the 1200s to describe someone from a good upstanding family, and later came to mean polite and chivalrous.
  • Bob also mentions that the term “second gentleman” was first used in 1924 to describe the husband of a female presidential candidate, and that today Doug Emhoff is the second gentleman of the United States.

 

Memes, inauguration, and Oval Office changes.

  • Marcia and Bob discuss the origin of the term “meme,” which was first introduced in a 1976 book by Richard Dawkins.
  • Bob Smith reveals President Biden removed a red button that delivered Diet Coke to the Oval Office.

 

US presidents’ speeches and term limits.

  • Marcia Smith and Bob Smith discuss the length of Inaugural Addresses, with Marcia mentioning President Trump’s caffeine addiction and Bob recalling President Bill Clinton’s long State of the Union message.
  • Marcia and Bob rank the Inaugural Addresses of past presidents, with George Washington delivering the shortest address at 135 words and Abraham Lincoln ranking third with a speech of around 270 words.
  • Bob Smith and Marcia Smith discuss term limits for Vice Presidents in the United States, with Bob pointing out that there are no term limits for VPs, while Marcia notes that only 14 VPs have served as President.
  • The two discuss the history of the Vice Presidency, including the 12th Amendment’s standard for electing VPs and the awkwardness of Aaron Burr receiving the same number of electoral votes as Thomas Jefferson in the 1800 election.

 

US history, politics, and trivia.

  • Bob Smith and Marcia Smith discuss Vice Presidents switching sides to help their presidents lose reelection, with examples of John C. Calhoun and George Clinton.
  • Marcia and Bob discuss black holes, including that there is no known escape from one.
  • Bob asks Marcia a question about vice presidents who have won the Nobel Prize, and Marcia provides the answers.

 

History, marriage, and pensions.

  • Bob Smith shares interesting facts about George Custer and his family’s history at the Little Bighorn battle.
  • Marcia Smith asks Bob about the Thinker sculpture and its origins, leading to a discussion on Dante Alighieri and Rodin’s work.
  • Bob Smith shares a heartwarming story about Viola Jackson, a 101-year-old Civil War widow who married a 93-year-old man in 1936, and how her pastor helped her embrace her history after keeping it a secret for decades.
  • Marcia Smith asks if Viola ever married again, and Bob confirms that she never did, highlighting the common practice during the Great Depression of young girls marrying older men for their pension benefits.
  • Bob and Marcia discuss the impact of Jennifer Lopez’s green Versace dress on the internet in 2000, leading to the invention of Google Images.

 

Trivia, word origins, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s quotes.

  • Marcia and Bob discuss the origins of the term “cuckold” and “bride,” with Marcia providing interesting insights into the etymology of these words.
  • Marcia and Bob discuss Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote “only when it is dark enough can you see the stars” and end with a joke about eating cookies.

 

Bob Smith 0:00
What did laughing gas have to do with the winning of the West?

Marcia Smith 0:04
Y’all know what barnyard animal can learn its name and do tricks faster than your pet dog.

Bob Smith 0:13
Oh really? answers to those and other questions in this episode of the off ramp with Bob and Marsha Smith

Welcome to the off ramp a chance to slow down steer clear of crazy take a side road to sanity and get some perspective on life. Well, Marcia, we think of the wild west as a rough and tumble place. What in the world would laughing gas have to do with that? Well,

Marcia Smith 0:57
I’m sure it’s one of the few things besides whiskey that made it all bearable.

Bob Smith 1:02
It actually made it possible in a way Oh, how’s

Marcia Smith 1:05
that? Okay. Well,

Bob Smith 1:06
you know, the Colt revolvers are the ones that were supposed to help win the West Samuel colts guns they revolvers and in his early years in order to help raise money to make prototypes of this revolving breech pistol, Samuel Colt used a bit of show business, he toured the country as Dr. Colt co UL T. and demonstrated nitrous oxide laughing gas to audiences for entertainment. And after the show, he would take collections and that’s how laughing I’ll bet that’s a laughing guest helped to win the West. Oh, that’s

Marcia Smith 1:40
funny. It’s

Bob Smith 1:41
not an obscure anything.

Marcia Smith 1:43
It is just just like us. That’s great. All right, but what barnyard animals can learn its name and do tricks faster than dogs?

Bob Smith 1:53
A barnyard animal?

Marcia Smith 1:55
Yeah. Okay. We’re

Bob Smith 1:56
not talking cats because you can’t teach cats to do. You can’t tell. So it’s a barnyard animal. Would it be some kind of cow?

Marcia Smith 2:02
Would it new?

Bob Smith 2:04
Okay, a horse? No. Okay. What? Okay, chickens. No, chicken. No, you can? Okay, I don’t know. What’s the answer.

Marcia Smith 2:12
Pigs are one of the smartest animals on the planet. No kidding. Their intelligence ranks higher than dogs. And even some primates, when they are trained. Pigs can learn their names by two or three weeks of age and respond when called. They can learn basic tricks faster than dogs to

Bob Smith 2:33
like, like lot rollover, play dead.

Marcia Smith 2:35
Yeah, they do tricks. If you want to touch a stick, I have never seen a pig do that. Yeah, just they just know they’re going to be a ham sandwich. So why bother? Also, if you ever wanted how they communicated to each other, they use their grunts to communicate with other pigs.

Bob Smith 2:51
That makes sense. I’ve never heard a pig talk or do anything? Well, no, but everybody

Marcia Smith 2:55
has their communications and there’s this grunting. Okay,

Bob Smith 3:00
okay. The husband of the Vice President is now being called the second gentleman. Yes, because there’s a First Lady. Yeah, there would be a second lady if it was a wife of a vice president, but it’s the husband of a vice president. So, gentleman, how far back in history does that word go? And what did it originally mean?

Marcia Smith 3:19
Husband?

Bob Smith 3:20
No gentleman.

Marcia Smith 3:21
Oh. Was I listening? Yeah. Hello. Hello, lady. gentle man. I don’t know Bob. Tell me it goes back to the year 1200.

Bob Smith 3:32
Oh, dear. So it’s more than 800 years old, and it’s modeled on the French equivalent, gentle home or gentle man. But that did not mean someone with good manners. Originally gentleman meant belonging to a good upstanding family. And later gentleman came to be known as polite, chivalrous. All those good manners, those kinds of terms. All right. When was gentleman first used to describe the husband of a female office holder?

Marcia Smith 4:00
Does this go back to royalty in England? No, it

Bob Smith 4:03
doesn’t go back that far. Okay. It’s the United States. I’ll give you a hint in it’s the 20th century. Oh, okay. Gee, who actually here’s another head. This was just looking ahead in the future. There was no such

Marcia Smith 4:13
husband, what would they call Bill Clinton? If Hillary won no.

Bob Smith 4:17
1924 when the writer for the Baltimore Evening Sun wondered what would happen if a woman became President? Would the gentleman look after the housekeeping and be sort of the first gentleman of the land while his wife was busy with the problems? Wash the underwear. But that’s exactly where we’ve come. And with that, Doug emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, we now have our second gentleman of the United States, we still have to have a first gentleman that will be when we have the first woman president. Okay. There’ll be the

Marcia Smith 4:50
first gem. Well, that makes sense. Okay, since you’re on the inauguration, can you tell me Bob, what meme came out of the inauguration?

Bob Smith 4:58
Does it have to do with peacefulness or a peaceful transition or something like that. It’s

Marcia Smith 5:02
Bernie Sanders and his mittens. Oh, his homemade mittens by some woman out east somewhere made them these big woolly mittens that in his blue mask. And people have been spreading that image everywhere. It’s kind of a gruff fashion grumpy and with his mittens and so people have used that meme six ways to Sunday.

Bob Smith 5:25
I’ve seen that they take that same image and they disguise it with different put them next

Marcia Smith 5:29
to a swimming pool. Yeah, sorts of things. It’s quite but the word when do you think meme came about? Just recently, I thought it was

Bob Smith 5:38
a recent term, but maybe it goes back I thought, I thought

Marcia Smith 5:41
it was too. But it. It’s from 1976 book called The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. This is the best I could come up with a definition of how he used the word meme, an ambiguous idea residing in the brain complete with predictions and empirical support.

Bob Smith 6:01
You know, I thought it was a modern cliche. So did I. That’s what I thought a Meme Meme was?

Marcia Smith 6:06
Well, actually, by definition, it’s an idea, behavior or style that becomes a fad and spreads quickly by invitation. It

Bob Smith 6:13
certainly is easier than saying all those words just saying it’s a meme. Yes.

Marcia Smith 6:16
Yeah, it sure is. And it goes back to 1976. So it’s not a new idea at all.

Bob Smith 6:22
And this is kind of interesting. What was one of the first changes Joe Biden made in the Oval Office when he became president. I’ll give you a couple of hints. It’s about the resolute desk. Yeah. Did he change the desk change something about the desk, that they’ve removed a red push button.

Marcia Smith 6:38
There’s a red push button. There was a red bush really to drop people into a hole in front of the desk.

Bob Smith 6:45
He removed a red push button President Trump installed on the resolute desk to order Diet Coke. Really? Yes. Yeah. And a day after a President Biden’s inauguration London Times reporter saw photos from the Oval Office he said President Biden has removed the Diet Coke but that’s funny when times ended or Tim Shipman and I interviewed Donald Trump in 2019, we became fascinated by a little red button and what it did, eventually Trump pressed it and the butler’s swiftly brought in a Diet Coke on a silver platter. It’s gone now. And that might sound too weird to be true. But there were two or three other references to this. A Financial Times writer said sitting across from Donald Trump in the Oval Office, my eyes were drawn to a little red button on a box. And he said he asked him Is that the nuclear button and Donald Trump said No, everyone thinks it is. Everybody gets a little nervous when I press the button. Oh my God, he’s pressing the button and red button was also noticed by an Associated Press reporter Julie Pace when she interviewed him. So with the push of a red button, a White House Butler arrived with a coke for the President’s

Marcia Smith 7:49
that’s pretty cool. That’d be nice. Yeah, bring somebody bring me coffee in the morning wine at night I think is good.

Bob Smith 7:55
You need a red button Marsh. Then you got me. I’ll do whatever you want.

Marcia Smith 7:59
Hardly, but you’re pretty good. Well, thank you. You when you think about it, you know, Trump did smoke or drink. He didn’t drink alcohol. But he was probably a little addicted to diet. It was probably pretty caffeinated. He probably have slept better at night if he didn’t drink so much. But that’s just sad. It’s just you talking? Yes. Okay, Bob. What President delivered the longest inaugural dress. I

Bob Smith 8:25
was gonna say Bill Clinton because he gave me a walkie talkie. He gave one of the longest State of the Union messages, but I don’t know who was it? William

Marcia Smith 8:33
Henry Harrison. Really? Yeah. He wrote by himself the whole speech and delivered an 8045 word speech. And it took so long to deliver in the rain in the cold. That what happened Bob, you died. He died. He had no hat on no scarf. No gloves. He was trying to show that he was macho. And he caught hypothermia. And then it turned into pneumonia and he died 32 days later on. Yeah. His speech took two hours to deliver. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Two hour speech in the rain and sleet. Short. Now let me just got a big price. Who do you think did the shortest the

Bob Smith 9:17
shortest Inaugural Address? Abraham Lincoln? No, but he was

Marcia Smith 9:21
number three. Okay. Okay. Okay. Who? George Washington. Oh, really? Yeah, he delivered the shortest inaugural dress and it came in at just 135 words. Well, that’s very short. What is that a minute when you talk here? 160 words. 150 words a minute. Yeah. So this is under a minute. It was his second inaugural just so I guess he figured he had said any everything he needed to say

Bob Smith 9:45
Well, George Washington if you read a lot of George Washington stuff, he never went for attention. Very interesting. Guy.

Marcia Smith 9:50
Number one was George number three was Lincoln. And number two, there’s second shortest was FDR not his first address. Okay, the last one. Yeah, the last Oh Okay,

Bob Smith 10:00
all right. We’re talking presidents, we’re talking vice presidents here, we know that there are term limits on presidents, they can only be elected to two terms of four years each. Now, here’s my question. Yes. What are the term limits on vice presidents? Well,

Marcia Smith 10:15
I would think it would be the same, you would think so. But guess

Bob Smith 10:18
what, that’s not there are no term limits on vise relief.

Marcia Smith 10:21
So they could be everybody could keep just like

Bob Smith 10:25
members of Congress, they face no restrictions on how long they serve. But no VP has served more than two terms. And only nine of America’s 48 VPS have served for eight years, only nine of 48. Really, and how many VPS have become president of 48

Marcia Smith 10:42
or 48? I will say half 24.

Bob Smith 10:46
Not that many amazingly, only 14 really only 14. And in our time, there have been five, I’m talking our lifetime. Yeah. You and me, Marcia, from Richard Nixon on five of these people who are presidents had been vice president. I read another one.

Marcia Smith 11:03
Sure. Go ahead. Originally. Bobby Smith in the back row. What is it?

Bob Smith 11:07
I got a question for you. Originally, the vice presidency went to the person who got the second most votes when you voted. Oh, the second most vote that was the vice president. Yeah. Did that ever lead to anything awkward? Well,

Marcia Smith 11:21
sure, back in the day before you could pick your own. So like

Bob Smith 11:25
in 1796. The two candidates were former friends who had become Jefferson and Adams, Jefferson and Adams. Yep, yep, yeah. And then more awkwardness came in the election of 1800. When Jefferson and his party’s preferred choice for VP Aaron Burr pulled the same number of electoral votes. So Aaron Burr, who’s infamous now received the same number of electoral votes as Thomas Jefferson. And that sent the contest to the House of Representatives. And they went 36 ballots before they finally selected Thomas Jefferson.

Marcia Smith 11:58
Was that before after Burke killed Hamilton

Bob Smith 12:02
that was before? Yeah, but he did kill Hamilton. Well, Vice President Yeah. So now by the 1804. election, the 12th Amendment gave us today’s standard.

Marcia Smith 12:11
Well, let’s get more serious, Bob. Oh, serious. Did you know that shrimp have hearts?

Bob Smith 12:19
They’re really tiny.

Marcia Smith 12:22
Where are they located? Bob, their hearts?

Bob Smith 12:23
Are they located in their tails? You know, that

Marcia Smith 12:26
would have been my first guess. But no. in their heads.

Bob Smith 12:32
That kind of normal. Who has their heart

Marcia Smith 12:34
in their head? You can have your heart in your hand. Okay. Your heart and your chest. Your

Bob Smith 12:39
brains? I’m sorry. Yes,

Marcia Smith 12:40
that there’s a big difference. I’ll show you some pictures later. Okay.

Bob Smith 12:47
All right, smart aleck.

Marcia Smith 12:50
And their hearts have three pairs of entrances for blood to come and circulate through it to keep their heart pumping through their head. Just Just thought. Okay.

Bob Smith 13:00
All right. Okay. I’ve got another vice presidential question, what Vice President switched sides and helped his President lose reelection. So he can become the vice president of

Marcia Smith 13:11
another guy. Oh, my goodness, how how

Bob Smith 13:13
and it’s a famous name in American history. But I didn’t even know he had been a vice president. He was a famous Senator. Okay, I don’t know. John C. Calhoun. Never heard of him now a famous American that that, you know, he was elected vice president under John Quincy Adams in 1824. But four years later, in 1828, he switched sides, he teamed up with Andrew Jackson to defeat Adams. I’m gonna defeat my own president. So he did so he became VP under Jackson. He was the second VP to serve two different presidents who was the first

Marcia Smith 13:49
I have no idea, but heard the

Bob Smith 13:51
name George Clinton. He was a governor of New York and I think he built the canal system. But anyway, he was VP under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The interesting thing about John C. Calhoun, the one that went with Andrew Jackson, he and the Jackson clashed and he eventually quit. He quit because there was a Senate seat opened up and he went to run for that. And then he left vice presidency

Marcia Smith 14:13
politics. There’s never a time when things were normal. Yeah. It’s always been crazy. Always. Okay, to follow your question. Can you ever escape a black hole? I

Bob Smith 14:27
don’t think you can. Because I think they’re like swirling vortex is out in space. Okay.

Marcia Smith 14:31
There is no known escape from a black hole.

Bob Smith 14:35
Do you know anybody who’s ever been in a black hole now? Okay, to escape Earth,

Marcia Smith 14:39
you have to travel at 25,000 miles per hour, right? If you go any slower, you you won’t break the planet’s gravitational pull. So we can’t get there to escape from a black hole. You must go faster than the speed of light, which we know Einstein says it’s impossible because this speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.

Bob Smith 15:04
That’s right, very fast second.

Marcia Smith 15:06
So as of now, there is no getting out of a black hole. So go around it if you can.

Bob Smith 15:12
Okay, so here’s my question. Has anyone ever escaped hell and how do you escape Hill? No, I’m just kidding. And let’s take a break. We’ll be back. You’re listening to trivia on the off ramp with Bob and Marsha Smith. Okay, we’re back Bob and Marsha Smith and the off ramp. Okay, I got a question for you. I told you about one VP who quit the job. There was a second VP who quit his job and that was in our lifetime. Who was that? Was

Marcia Smith 15:39
that? That wasn’t? What’s his name?

Bob Smith 15:44
Isn’t it? Yeah, Girotti. Agnew, why did he resign?

Marcia Smith 15:46
I don’t know. Was he ticked off at Nixon.

Bob Smith 15:49
He was charged with tax evasion and bribery. Yeah, accepting bribes. I

Marcia Smith 15:53
think he Yeah, I think Nixon said, Just quit, so I don’t have to fire you.

Bob Smith 15:57
And here’s one more on vice presidents. What world famous fries have three vice presidents one? Not presidents, but vice presidents.

Marcia Smith 16:06
One famous prize, the Nobel Peace Nobel

Bob Smith 16:10
Prize. You’re absolutely right. One by three different people by Teddy Roosevelt. He won a Nobel Prize in 1906 for negotiating the end of the Brusho Japanese war. And Charles Dawes under Calvin Coolidge won the Nobel Prize for a world war one reparations plan for Germany and Al Gore, won a 2007 Nobel Prize for raising awareness of climate change. I’d totally forgotten about that one. Anyway, there’s some facts and interesting tidbits about the vice presidency.

Marcia Smith 16:38
Thank you, Bob. You’re welcome, Marcia.

Bob Smith 16:40
Here’s another tidbit. Okay, go ahead. George Custer. Did you know he wasn’t the only member of his family to die at the Little Bighorn? Oh, really? I didn’t know this. But two of his brothers, a nephew and a brother in law. Were also among the 226 men who died at Custers last stand, so he wiped out a lot of his family with his brothers and nephew and a brother in law.

Marcia Smith 17:04
Oh my god. Gee? That’s nice, George. Thanks a lot. Yeah, that’s why military doesn’t let families serve in the same regiments anymore. Yeah, they don’t. They learned a valuable lesson there. Just wipe out generation of family there. You know, the world’s best known sculptures is the thinker by a goosed Rodin, Rodin. So who was the thinker, Bob?

Bob Smith 17:29
Well, actually, it was originally called the stinker. And then they had to change that because it wasn’t considered sophisticated enough. I don’t know who the thinker was, Marcia.

Marcia Smith 17:39
Well, this is very interesting. The Italian poet Dante Allah Garriott he wrote The Divine Comedy anyway, Rodin did it of him. Oh, really? Yeah. He was supposed to be thinking in front of the gates of hell. In fact, Rodin named the sculpture the poet, because he did that whole there’s the original name of Yes, but it was an obscure critic, unfamiliar with Dante, who miss named the masterpiece with the title we use today. The Thinker, I’ll be darned so he Yeah, he miss named it and it stayed. And Rodin statue was naked because the sculptor wanted a heroic classical figure to represent thought as poetry

Bob Smith 18:20
and the classics. The Greeks had mostly naked nude sculptures. It’s more fun to look it is more fun. Depends on it’s just gets here. Okay. All right. Something that was lost in the news. The last few weeks of 2020 was a death of a person who was the last of her kind. Do you have any idea who that was a woman who died at the age of 101 in a nursing home in Missouri, she’s the last of her kind when what year December of 2020. Last you kind of got lost in all the political yeah happening in the year end.

Marcia Smith 18:53
Ah, last of her kind. Gees. Tell me this

Bob Smith 18:57
will blow your mind. She was the last civil war widow.

Marcia Smith 19:02
Oh, cheese. Yes, I did read that. She was Helen

Bob Smith 19:04
Viola Jackson, the wife of a member of the 14th, Missouri Calvary in the Civil War. She was 101 years old when she died. Can you imagine now she was a 17 year old school girl when she married 93 year old James Bolin in 1936. Her father had volunteered her to stop by Bolton’s house daily to provide care and help with chores. This was in the Great Depression. And to pay back her kindness. He offered to marry her so she could receive his pension plan. That’s a nice thing when he died. And they went in secret at his home in 1936. And there was no intimacy in the marriage. She never lived with him. And after his death, she did not seek his pension. Oh, and she never told anyone about their marriage until 2017. When she was talking to her pastor. She thought she’d be emblazoned with a scarlet a because this would be so such a scandal for a young girl to marry than the older guy. moments she kept it a secret her entire life. Her pastor said she told him about her secret marriage to a much older man. And she mentioned in passing that he had fought in the Civil War. He said, I said, What backup about that? What do you mean? He was in the Civil War? He checked into her story found everything was spot on. And then he checked with service records. Yep, yep, it’s true. And after a lifetime of avoiding her past, she embraced it. In her final year, she got a place on the Missouri Walk of Fame. She spoke to schoolchildren and had a Facebook page dedicated. That’s so cool. Yeah. And then, after her relatives found out about his role in her life, they went to her nursing home and presented her with a framed photo of him. She broke down and cried. She kept touching the frame and said, This is the only man who ever loved me.

Marcia Smith 20:47
Did she ever did she ever never got married?

Bob Smith 20:50
No. Never married again. Wow. And I guess this was a common thing back in the depression that it wasn’t considered there were a lot of older men who were civil war pensioners who were really in need of help. And young girls would be their maids are and several of them married for older men and they get because it could give the pension that’s how the Civil War pensions work. You could give your pension to a child or whatever. In fact, the last Civil War pensioner Irene triplet died last year to she was nine years old. She was still receiving $73 a month in a civil war pension here in the 21st century, and in the midst of Black Lives Matter and Confederate flags being walked through the Capitol. Still here the last remnants of the Civil War the last human beings associated with that still alive. Amazing

Marcia Smith 21:41
little connection there. Bob

Bob Smith 21:43
2020.

Marcia Smith 21:44
Speaking of distress, yes, what do the distress letters SOS stands for?

Bob Smith 21:51
Save our ship. I very buddy used to think. But I don’t think it stood for anything. It was just memorable. By the way it sounded

Marcia Smith 21:58
save our ship save our souls. Yeah, Morse code is a series of electrical impulses that signify the letters have a structured message. And what is SOS you know what it is in dots and dashes data

Bob Smith 22:11
dot dash dash dash that 303 Dots,

Marcia Smith 22:15
three dashes three dots, that’s what you did. And that was picked because it was more memorable. So it’s the easiest combination to transmit. 333. Okay, long, short, long, short. It’s make sense. Most people can understand it when they hear it. Yeah, you’re right. It doesn’t stand for anything. And it just stress. Okay. All

Bob Smith 22:36
right, Marsha. This is something that came upon recently. And I’d forgotten about this. And she’s saying at the inaugural. How did Jennifer Lopez change the internet forever? This happened in 2000 2000.

Marcia Smith 22:51
So 20 years ago, did she post a video of her dancing or something?

Bob Smith 22:55
Well, somebody posted something of her. Okay. All right. It was a green Versace dress she wore at the February Grammy Awards in 2000. A very revealing dress with a neckline that plunged down to her navel. And people heard about it. And the web exploded with searches for pictures of that. But back then Google was only two years old and search results back then were just blue links, underline blue words. So finding something wasn’t easy. But Eric Schmidt said it was obvious the dress was the most popular search query we had ever seen. Wow. But we had no surefire way of getting users whether they wanted right away. So that inspired Google to invent google images. And it was not a fast thing. They put two people on that project. And it took a whole year to develop a way to easily search for images on the web. Wow.

Marcia Smith 23:45
So JLo JLo Yes. The instigator for Google Search images. That’s right. Wow, that’s a claim to fame.

Bob Smith 23:53
And they launched Google Images in July 2001. But that’s how Jennifer Lopez and her revealing dress changed the internet forever. Wow. Fascinating.

Marcia Smith 24:04
Well, here’s off the grid question, Bob. Why is the word cuckold used to describe the husband of an unfaithful wife?

Bob Smith 24:12
Well, that’s a good question. I’ve been I’ve seen that term a lot more lately for some reason, but I don’t know why. I’ll tell

Marcia Smith 24:18
you my my favorite use that word was in one of my favorite movies. Crazy Stupid Love. Okay. Steve Carell walks around, like in a day sewing. I’m a cuckold. It was cold. I get to repeat again.

Bob Smith 24:33
It’s when your your spouse is having an affair. And it’s so obvious. Yeah, not to you unnecessarily.

Marcia Smith 24:38
It’s a term, centuries old metaphor for a deceived husband and is taken from the habits of the European cuckoo bird, which in the spring, lays a single egg in the nest of some other unsuspecting bird, so they can take the time to sit on it and hatch it and then they can feed it to when it hatch. So it gets, you know, it’s all the fun and no

Bob Smith 25:02
responsibility go that doesn’t look like you or me. Yeah. When

Marcia Smith 25:05
a husband has been cuckolded, his nest has been violated by another, and who might have well left behind his own offspring. So that’s it comes from the cuckoo bird who is I’ve known that cuckoo bird did that. I

Bob Smith 25:19
didn’t know that. Well, that’s great. So that’s the origin of called I’ve got a word origin question. Okay. When people are married, they are bride and groom. What does the word bride mean originally?

Marcia Smith 25:32
Ah, originally?

Bob Smith 25:35
No, not slave. But originally the word bride is derived from an ancient Teutonic word meeting to cook out forgot the bride and groom is the man and his cook.

Marcia Smith 25:47
Okay, lost that lottery. All right, I just want to say to any rappers, our listeners out there, if you have a question you’d like us to use and give you a shout out this, go to our website at

Bob Smith 25:59
the off ramp dot show, go to the Contact Us section and type in your information

Marcia Smith 26:05
and just put in a question and the answer. If it’s for one of us specifically, say it otherwise one of us will choose it.

Bob Smith 26:11
See, Bob, this is for you. Ask Marsha

Marcia Smith 26:15
and also where you’re from? That’s, that’d be fun.

Bob Smith 26:18
You had something there to wrap us up. Sure.

Marcia Smith 26:21
This past week was Martin Luther King Day. And he had many memorable things to say. And one of them which isn’t often heard is, but I know somehow that only when it is dark enough. Can you see the stars? Very nice. It is Isn’t that nice? imagery. And then I’ll end up with my one of my favorite poets. Cookie Monster. So you said today Me will live in the moment. Unless it is unpleasant. In which case me will eat a cookie.

Bob Smith 26:55
Me will eat a cookie. Okay. That sounds good. Let’s go get a cookie right?

Marcia Smith 27:00
Yeah, I’m with you there.

Bob Smith 27:02
Let’s go to a place where you they warm them up. Oh, yes. Serve them to you. Oh, yes. All right. Well, that’s it for this episode of the off ramp. We hope you’ve enjoyed your stay with us. I’m Bob Smith. I’m Marcia Smith. Join us next time when we have more fun trivia for you here

Marcia Smith 27:17
on the off ramp.

Bob Smith 27:24
The off ramp is produced in association with CPL radio online and the Cedarburg Public Library Cedarburg, Wisconsin.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai