The Wizard of Oz

says she is sending “an insect” to pester Dorothy and her companions, and the number was filmed but was ultimately cut from the movie because the studio felt the movie was too long. Arlen took some home movies of part of the dance sequence, however, so some of the number still exists and has been excerpted in “behindthe-scenes” documentaries about the movie.

I’m suffering from metal fatigue – This pun from Tin Man refers to metal worn to the point of breaking usually; he simply means he’s tired.

Humbug – Webster’s says, “One who attempts to trick or deceive.” The Wizard admits he pretended to be supernaturally powerful when he wasn’t, but defends himself: “I’m a very good man but a very bad wizard.”

Universitatus commetteatum e pluribus unum - That ol’ Wizard is just making things up now, in pseudoLatin. He means the university committee (universitatus commetteatum) is conferring this diploma on the Scarecrow, and then he throws in a real Latin phrase that he learned from U.S. money, e pluribus unum, which means “out of many, one,” a reference to our country being composed of so many states, you know, the United States.

“The sum of the square root of any 2 sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side.” Compare the Scarecrow’s definition of this triangle with MathWorld’s: “An isosceles triangle is a triangle with (at least) two equal sides. [Assuming] the two equal sides have length b, the remaining side has length a. This property is equivalent to two angles of the triangle being equal. An isosceles triangle therefore has both two equal sides and two equal angles. The name derives from the Greek iso (same) and skelos (leg).” Sounds as if the Scarecrow has “caught” the Wizard’s speech patterns!

Fortitude - “strength of mind allowing one to endure pain or adversity courageously.”

Cataclysmic - disastrous.

Stratospheric skill - well, the dictionary says, “the relatively isothermal part of the atmosphere above the strophospere and below the mesosphere,” but it just means the sky. The Wizard has lapsed into his standard hot air balloon introduction, as if he’s at a county fair.

Conveyance - a vehicle, like a car or bus, or, in the 19th century, horse and buggy.

Par ardua ad alta - Here’s some more bogus Latin. The Wizard probably means that flying his balloon is difficult (ardua = arduous, I think) and will rise impossibly high (unless alta = old, as it does in German, but old makes even less sense than the Wizard usually does). telegraph - “a [19th century] communication system that transmits and receives . . . electric impulses,” usually the dots and dashes of Morse code, over wires. This system predates telephones, it’s so old!

L. Frank Baum and Syracuse Timeline From: Michelle Stone’s German Immigrant Ancestry in Syracuse and Onondaga County, NY, 1654 – 1945 Welcome/Willkommen!

[Ms. Stone’s introduction to her timeline, which she generously allowed me to excerpt, says it all.] Not many people think of Onondaga County, New York, when they think of German immigrants arriving at the port towns of the United States and fanning out across the country’s interior. More notoriously “German” hubs along the migration trails come to mind: New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee, to name just a few. Yet a significant and flourishing German community did exist in Onondaga County almost