Complex Numbers

Boned

Oh good. If this prompt for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+] hadn't come up at random, I might have had to write an extra entry.

boning

Ever boned a fish?

I haven't, because I don't fish, but I've seen people do it. And not on one of those websites, either. Seems like a lot of work, though as with anything, practice improves skill. Some fish just don't like to be boned, though, which can lead to oral discomfort or even penetration.

The word "deboning" in this context means the same thing, which is just one of those weird things about English, like flammable/inflammable or contronyms like "cleave."

But for this blogging activity, which is all about clothing, we're not talking about fish, or anything we do with our clothes (mostly) off. And for once, I don't have to do extensive research to know what it means.

Not fish, then. But whales, which live with fish but aren't them. Back before the inspired invention of the brassiere, for a while, corsets were all the rage. And back before plastics (see previous entry on nylon), corsets were stiffened by whale bones.

Which is oddly appropriate. See, "corset" comes from an old French word meaning "body." The modern version is "corps" (pronounced more like "core" just like with the Marine Corps, and not to be confused with "cœur," which translates to "heart" and is pronounced more like "curr," as in "no1curr") and from one of these we get the English "corpse." So you had people (it's associated with women's wear but for a long time all genders wore a kind of corset) wearing parts of whale corpses to support part of their own living bodies. An endoskeleton turned exoskeleton.

We (mostly) don't kill whales for fashion, or lighting, or meat, anymore. Instead, we use older corpses. Not of dinosaurs, per popular misconception and one oil company's brontosaurus logo, but ancient marine life. They're pumped out of wells, refined, and some of them get molded into plastic boning (yes, people still wear corsets; see any RenFaire).

Eventually, and not too far in the future, we'll run out of the corpses that took billions of years to accumulate.

And then, we're well and truly boned.