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Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:21:Mister Clarke had to get in line…(Alan Sinder)

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This page discusses queuing

Stephensonia

As I could never grok why Stan Lee had his version of Thor speak in a psuedo-Elizabethan English manner — I thought there was something odd about Mister Clarke the Apothecary having to “get in line” as they say in New York. Makes you wonder - eh?

Authored entries

Queue

NOUN:

  1. A line of waiting people or vehicles.
  2. A long braid of hair worn hanging down the back of the neck; a pigtail.
  3. Computer Science

a. A sequence of stored data or programs awaiting processing. b. A data structure from which the first item that can be retrieved is the one stored earliest.

INTRANSITIVE VERB:

Inflected forms: queued ,queu·ing ,queues To get in line: queue up at the box office.

ETYMOLOGY:

French, from Old French cue , tail, from Latin cauda, coda.

Coda (Italian for "tail"; from the Latin cauda), in music, a term for a passage which brings a movement or a separate piece to a conclusion. This developed from the simple chords of a cadence into an elaborate and independent form. In a series of variations on a theme or in a composition with a fixed order of subjects, the coda is a passage sufficiently contrasted with the conclusions of the separate variations or subjects, added to form a complete conclusion to the whole. Beethoven raised the coda to a feature of the highest importance. What is known in popular music as an outro can be considered a coda.

In music notation, the coda symbol is used as a navigation marker, similarly to the dal Segno sign. It looks like a large O with a + superimposed.

It is encountered mainly in transcriptions of popular music, and is used where the exit from a repeated section is within that section rather than at the end. The instruction "To Coda" indicated that the performer is to jump to the separate section headed with the symbol.

WORD HISTORY:

When the British stand in queues (as they have been doing at least since 1837, when this meaning of the word is first recorded in English), they may not realize they form a tail. The French word queue from which the English word is borrowed is a descendant of Latin coda, meaning “tail.”

French queue appeared in 1748 in English, referring to a plait of hair hanging down the back of the neck. By 1802 wearing a queue was a regulation in the British army, but by the mid-19th century queues had disappeared along with cocked hats. Latin coda is also the source of Italian coda, which was adopted into English as a musical term (like so many other English musical terms that come from Italian). A coda is thus literally the “tail end” of a movement or compositio