Stuff on the road. I've often thought about having a contest for weird stuff that you'd find riding a bike on the road.I found this thing today riding on the Peninsula. I was riding (jra) out by Old Mission Tavern and the shadows from the trees on the west side of M-37 made shadows on the 10' wide paved shoulder. You always need to be extra cautious if you're riding fast - watch for junk. I barely missed this thing and it looked so ominous that I turned around to see if it was a dried leaf or what.
Image what would have happened if I'd drilled this thing?
Keep "your eyes peeled."
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It’s spelled peeled, as in peeling an apple. It derives from an old verb pill, “to plunder”, which is the root of our modern word pillage.
It came to us from the Latin root pilare, meaning “to take the hair off, pluck” (closely connected with our depilate), but which also had the figurative meaning of “plunder, cheat”, almost exactly the same as the figurative meaning of our modern verbs fleece or pluck.
From about the 17th century on, pill was commonly spelled peel and took on the sense of “to remove or strip” in the weakened sense of removing an outer covering, such as a fruit. The figurative sense of keeping alert, by removing any covering of the eye that might impede vision, seems to have appeared in the US about 1850.
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In Charles Earle Funk's book "Heaven's to Betsy" on words and their origins he writes: To be very observant or extremely alert; to keep a sharp lookout. No record of this American expression has been turned up earlier than 1833, but the fact that it then appeared in a newspaper (The Political Examiner, of Shelbyville, Kentucky) is a fair indication that it was already well known to any reader. The meaning was not explained. The passage read: "I wish I may be shot if I don't think you had better keep your eyes skinned so that you can look powerful sharp, lest we get rowed up the river this heat." That is all Mr. Funk wrote on the matter. As to the expression itself, I think it's self-explanatory.
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To keep one's eyes peeled means to be alert, observant. This seems an odd phrase, but dates back to the 1820s in Britain, when Sir Robert Peel established the first organised police force. The officers were known as 'peelers, or 'bobbies'. They were expected to be particularly observant and to keep their eyes 'peeled', after their founder's orders! Of the two popular names, only 'bobby' survives.
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That's enough school work for tonoght. Ride safe.
