The Disappearance of the Faint

I do declare, I feel a fainting spell coming on, oh my!

What ever happened to the good ol’ fashioned faint? Back in the Victorian era when women would actually faint so much, they had “fainting rooms”. A whole damn room with a luxurious couch just for slowly falling down on with the back of one’s hand on their forehead! That’s damn fancy! But the price of vanity was high with the much sought after “hourglass” shape and women would cram themselves into a corset that was then tightened to the point of rib cage crushing, internal organ crowding and the inability to breathe normally. Sometimes I see this in modern day life, but the corset has been replaced with black stretch pants. But I digress.

These days we just need a barstool and the ability to run up a big tab down at O’Malley’s Mad Irish Hole in the Wall. Wait, that’s passing out, and that is not to be confused with fainting, which is not to be confused with blacking out, which is not to be confused with vertigo, or spinninghead, giddiness, wobbliness and shakiness. Although they all sound EXACTLY the same, they are all different.

My Feint Makes You Faint

Now if you throw ‘feinting’ into this mix of wobbly goodness, you will be totally confused unless you see how it is spelled. Feinting is actually when you fake a move, such as in boxing or MMA when you pretend to throw a punch at one area of the body and actually hit them in another area. Now that can then also be misconstrued as pretending to be injured or dead to fake out your enemy, which then throws another spelling conundrum into the mix with the “Is it Fainting or Feinting”? There is a breed of goats that seem to have it down pat, but, are they actually fainting? Or are they “feinting”? It’s a question that only the goat will know, and goat handlers can only speculate when chasing these poor creatures around with umbrellas. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we9_CdNPuJg]

Alimony or Beer? It’s all so confusing

Some people faint at the sight of blood, some when they’ve seen a ghost and others when the alimony settlement is made in court. Enter, the smelling salts. These fancy little contraptions have been around since the Roman times and are mentioned as early as 77AD in writings of Pliny the Elder, which then leads to another very strange connection with all this. Pliny the Elder is also a modern day beer made by Russian River Brewing Company. Now one would think that if you imbibed enough of Pliny the Elder, one would need the ‘sal ammoniac’ (smelling salt) that Pliny actually writes about to come out of a ‘passing out’, which is not to be confused with a fainting,

You look faint, come lie down here on my couch

but the more I read into this whole nonsense of losing one’s consciousness in whichever way one sees fit, I have no idea what any of it means anymore.

So let’s have one more Pliny the Elder in an attempt to reach the vertigo effect and cheers to corsets and to fancy couches for falling down on when one feints, or faints.

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