Quite a sensational year, I reckon.
I well remember Ms. Bobbitt’s sharp reply to her husband’s infidelty. The Mikado himself couldn’t have done better.
I would never have judged her “insane”. Quite the contrary. But her follow-through was inadequate: look where the offending member ended up. In her place, I think I’d have considered putting it through the food processor, before offering it to the doggies. ---- (Of course, it’s easy to be smugly wise after the event.)
Hot desk—hot bunk, hot bed.
I am fairly confident that “hot bunk" could be antedated by “hot bed”. The sharing of a bed alternately by two people is an idea that could be as old as poverty (or as old as beds, at any rate). Orwell describes it, in the first chapter of Down and Out in Paris and London. Cox and Box (and Box and Cox) take the idea back a hundred years earlier. Even though none of these works actually uses the term “hot bed”, my guess is that a diligent searcher, with more resources and more patience than myself, could find “hot bed” somewhere ashore, a lot earlier than 1939.
