eHam.net News

///////////////////////////////////////////
An update on the WIA Inward QSL Operation:

Posted: 07 Feb 2016 04:18 PM PST
http://www.eham.net/articles/36123


After receiving about 6,500 QSL cards at the WIA Inwards QSL Bureau just
after the Christmas-New Year closedown, sorting and distribution continues.
Several thousand cards have been sent to the State and Territory QSL
managers. The remaining will be sorted over the next two weeks. There are a
lot of callsigns receiving QSL cards that are new ones for the bureau.


///////////////////////////////////////////
It's Getting Hammy in He

Posted: 07 Feb 2016 04:17 PM PST
http://www.eham.net/articles/36122


At the behest of a colleague, University of Michigan Professor Anne Curzan
started poking into the history of ham. The word, that is. "When you think
about it, ham-handed is a really weird way to say something is clumsy or
awkward," says Curzan. So how does a beloved lunch meat also become an
idiom for the ineffectual? The food ham is the most common usage of the
word ham, and that originates from the name for a body part. "Ham refers to
the back of a knee or the thigh," says Curzan. "And certainly pigs have
hams, but humans also have hams. I think we more commonly think of it as a
hamstring, the tendon that runs up the back of your thigh." The word ham
naturally extended to a pig thigh that was salted and dried, which is the
food some of us love to put on sandwiches. But in the late 19th century,
the word started seeing uses outside of the deli. "[In] 1919, we see ham
show up to refer to an amateur telegraphist, or an amateur radio operator,"
says Curzan. "There, we have this use of ham to refer to someone who is
amateur, and maybe ineffective in that amateur role." After the 19th
century, Curzan found usages of ham-handed that were increasingly
figurative as writers began to make clear analogies between fists and,
well, slabs of meat. Before long, ham-handed began to refer to a general
state of awkwardness.