More Than You Can Shake A Stick At Traditional Cache

This is my first hide. Hope you like it. I wanted to wait till I found more caches to hide one, but it was bugging me so I had to get it out of my system. I love the way this stretch of road and Tangent Drive are peppered with caches. But there was not one at this little park close to where I live. I wondered why till I started this hide. Now I know. This park is small and very well maintained. It also has more muggles then you can shake a stick at. In trying to hide this one in the day time, I was being watched too much. So I did it at night, and I recommend finding it at night too. You may be able to catch this park empty some days. Because this park is as I described above, I had to be very creative with the camouflage. I am sure this has been done before but I have never seen it. This is new for me so it will be interesting to see if this cache gets muggled or not. Also want to thank Team Winston, for hiding the first one I found: Kickapoo Where Are You? And deulist and Pablo Mac because their caches are hidden along this road too. I hope this cache can fall among the ranks of these and all the other great ones I have found. Another thanks also to my neighbor. He is a survivalist nut. And for the last 6 months has been practicing the art of making a fire without matches. He is not a geocacher but may be as soon as I drag him out. One of his kids always asks to go with us when we go. When I was thinking of hiding this one he helped me with the camo. Since I love phrases and think it is in order, here is a little history. It seems the Oxford English Dictionary knows — in the issue of the Lancaster Journal of Pennsylvania dated 5 August 1818: “We have in Lancaster as many Taverns as you can shake a stick at”. Another early example is from Davy Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East of 1835: “This was a temperance house, and there was nothing to treat a friend that was worth shaking a stick at”. A little later, in A Book of Vagaries by James K Paulding of 1868, this appears: “The roistering barbecue fellow swore he was equal to any man you could shake a stick at”. The modern use of the phrase always exists as part of the extended and fixed phrase “more ... than you can shake a stick at”, meaning an abundance, plenty. The phrase without the “more than” element is rather older, but not by much. Shaking a stick at somebody, of course, is a threatening gesture, or at least one of defiance. So to say that you have shaken a stick at somebody is to suggest that person is an opponent, perhaps a worthy one. The sense in the second and third quotations above seem to fit this idea: “nothing worth shaking a stick at” means nothing of value; “equal to any man you could shake a stick at” means that the speaker is equal to any man of consequence. Where it comes from can only be conjecture. One possibility that has been put forward is that it derives from the counting of farm animals, which one might do by pointing one’s stick at each in turn. So having more than one can shake one’s stick at, or tally, would imply a great number. This doesn’t fit the early examples, though, which don’t have any idea of counting about them. Another idea is that it comes from battle, in which one might shake a stick at one’s vanquished enemy. This could possibly have led into the early usages. Following publication of this piece in the World Wide Words newsletter, Suzan Hendren and Sherwin Cogan suggested that it might have come from the Native American practice of counting coup, in which merit was gained by touching a vanquished enemy in battle. In that case, “too many to shake a stick at” might indicate a surplus of fallen enemies, and “not worth shaking a stick at” would equate a person with “an enemy who is so cowardly or worthless that there is no merit to be gained from counting coup on him”, as Sherwin Cogan put it. An intriguing idea, but there’s no evidence that I know of. Let me summarize: nobody knows for sure. And just to give credit where it is do, I got this info from http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/339663. Thanks and have fun, can’t wait to see the FTF. P.S. please let me know if the camo wears out and I will fix it. Thanks.