A seedling Quercus alba destined to grow into a mighty white oak.
The following courtesy of http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/247100.html:
Mighty oaks from little acorns grow
Meaning: Great things may come from small beginnings.
Origin:
The word acorn doesn't come from 'oak' and 'corn', as is popularly supposed, but from the Old English 'aecern', meaning berry or fruit. The tree genus Acer comes from the same root.
Before oaks were mighty they were first either great, tall, sturdy or even just big. Examples of early variants of 'mighty oaks from little acorns grow' are found in Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, 1374,
"as an ook cometh of a litel spyr" [a spyr, or spire, is a sapling]
Thomas Fuller's Gnomologia, 1732:
"The greatest Oaks have been little Acorns."
and in an essay by D. Everett in The Columbian Orator, 1797:
"Large streams from little fountains flow, Tall oaks from little acorns grow."
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations states that 'great oaks from little acorns grow' is a 14th century proverb. Unfortunately, they don't include any details to support their view.
The 'mighty' version is known, in the USA at least, from the middle of the 19th century. It appeared in A. B. Johnson's The Philosophical Emperor a Political Experiment, 1841.
"ACORN Exposed" courtesy of The American Spectator:
By Matthew Vadum on 9.14.09 @ 6:08AM
ACORN's relentless death march continued last week as undercover sting videos surfaced in which the group's employees counseled reporters posing as a pimp and a prostitute on how to set up a house of ill repute using tax dollars.
The sensational undercover video showed ACORN Housing employees in the group's Baltimore office trying to help the two journalists set up a brothel. The pair told ACORN employees that underage girls from El Salvador were ready to enter the U.S. and start working as child prostitutes.
The video, first shown on Andrew Breitbart's new website Big Government, was featured that day on Glenn Beck's TV program. Hannah Giles, who portrayed the prostitute in the video, told Beck she got involved in the project "to expose ACORN."
"I saw them as a thug organization that was getting my tax dollars," said Giles.
But guess who might be facing prosecution for exposing the group best known for its never-ending voter registration fraud scandals? You guessed it -- the conservative journalists involved in the undercover reporting of course!
Obama supporter Patricia Jessamy, Maryland State's Attorney for Baltimore City, released a statement saying the video might violate the state's anti-wiretapping law that was used against Linda Tripp after she recorded telephone conversations with President Clinton's Oval Office paramour Monica Lewinsky. The law requires consent to the recording by both parties in a conversation . . .
Doing good does not always end up well. Take the case of Jesus of Nazareth. Let us pray for the brave young journalists who risked a lot to shine the light of truth on ACORN. But, so as not to lose sight of the forest here for the fact that they found a great number of trees, one should look at a well documented phenomenon in our modern world: corporate culture. This reflects the fact that corporations are living entities and have a sort of body, mind, and soul. It would surely appear that ACORN as an organization is (morally) ill. The corporate culture, often as not an extension of the top management's beliefs, aspirations, and morality, is one of corruption. Read Wade Rathke's contrary views out of fairness, some expressed below. But use your common sense. And know that corruption is contagious. Let's look at Merriam-Webster for some precision in language:
Main Entry: cor·rup·tion
Pronunciation: \kə-ˈrəp-shən\
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
1 a : impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle : depravity b : decay, decomposition c : inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (as bribery) d : a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct
2 archaic : an agency or influence that corrupts
3 chiefly dialect : pus
Main Entry: con·ta·gion
Pronunciation: \kən-ˈtā-jən\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin contagion-, contagio, from contingere to have contact with, pollute — more at contingent
Date: 14th century
1 a : a contagious disease b : the transmission of a disease by direct or indirect contact c : a disease-producing agent (as a virus)
2 a : poison b : contagious influence, quality, or nature c : corrupting influence or contact
3 a : rapid communication of an influence (as a doctrine or emotional state) b : an influence that spreads rapidly
Main Entry: 1cul·ture
Pronunciation: \ˈkəl-chər\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, cultivated land, cultivation, from Anglo-French, from Latin cultura, from cultus, past participle
Date: 15th century
1 : cultivation, tillage
2 : the act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties especially by education
3 : expert care and training
4 a : enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training b : acquaintance with and taste in fine arts, humanities, and broad aspects of science as distinguished from vocational and technical skills
5 a : the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations b : the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life} shared by people in a place or time
6 : the act or process of cultivating living material (as bacteria or viruses) in prepared nutrient media; also : a product of such cultivation
Pick a side on the ACORN debate. Then let's all tell our "best congress money can buy" how we want this matter handled. I'd like to see some of the promised transparency that was to accompany change, not otherwise specified.
I'd like to see if this is a RICO situation. Fairness, below:
"Fake Rush, Beck Demo’s and Boycott Betsy’s" courtesy of Wade Rathke's Blog:
Ottawa Going from city to city in California last week and now wrapped in the good spirited soul of Canada, it was all I could do in my brief 30 hours in New Orleans to keep up with the wildness of the city and the hate-eration of these times. One thing that had perplexed me had been a tweet from my darling daughter saying something about Betsy’s Pancake House across from her office, the ACORN building on Canal Street. Catching up on the internet and visiting with the home folks I finally got it. It was another “manufactured” media event where the main story is the imitation of real life.
In what is becoming the modus operandi for the “all-the-news-we-can-make-up-all-the-time” Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh’s, they had gotten one of their buddies, some fellow named John Osterlink from Massachusetts who is a talkie host on a New Orleans radio station to try to organize a charade “protest” across from the ACORN headquarters in New Orleans. So, the protest had a radio promo by Beck himself it seems, and the call to arms was the following:
John Osterlind was interviewed by Glenn Beck this morning about the ACORN protest he has organized for today, Sept.11 at Betsy’s Pancake House(across the street from ACORN Headquarters) on Canal from 5pm – 7pm. John is urging everyone to bring signs and come make our voices heard about the need for an investigation of ACORN before they receive another dollar of our tax money. I feel it is especially important for us to show up in large numbers as this is the first protest of this kind that’s been called for by a public figure from “outside” the Tea Party movement. If we show up in force and make it a success, John, and WRNO, will be more inclined to take part in these kind of events in the future. Plus, John’s a cool guy and it will be a lot of fun!
Of course it is a well settled question that has been elaborately documented that ACORN gets no federal money, but hey from the crowd talking about death panels all the time, we can’t expect accuracy, can we?
Talking to eyewitnesses, it seems there were 20 or so people, all white, so it is hard to tell where in New Orleans the crowd might have been drawn, who milled around Betsy’s Pancake House late Friday afternoon. There were a couple of signs and a lot of beer! They plugged into Betsy’s electricity and the joint stayed open to service the motley crowd. Betsy’s is cattycorner to the ACORN building and across the large neutral ground and streetcar tracks, so quite honestly if someone hadn’t noticed them as they were leaving work, it might have been an early Saints tailgating crowd coming in from the Parish somewhere.
When some of the ACORN people walked over to see what was happening and talked to Betsy’s daughter who runs the joint now (Betsy was murdered tragically a couple of years ago in a robbery), and asked how they could have stood for this given all of the business the building has given them along with the other non-profits from the United Way and Red Cross along the block, she simply said: “I need the business.”
Well, sister, this is all monkey business and in fact big business for Clear Channel Communications which owns WRNO and promotes the Beck and Limbaugh shows. The following piece from Dave Walker, television reporter for the Times-Picayune on April 16, 2008 when Limbaugh “came over” to WRNO from WWL, a competitor in New Orleans, says it all, and also says quite a lot about how we got a piece of work like this guy Osterlink in the Crescent City . . .
Please read all of the account on Wade Rathke's blog if the spirit moves you to know more. Really reassuring that ACORN receives no federal dollars. Believe that and someone will sell you a bridge over the St. Lucie river.
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