Get Out There, Kid!

[00:00] Alright guys, the last topic we got for this show is an under-googlable.
[00:07] Under-googlables? That was the play of it.
[00:22] Super excited.
[00:23] You told us we had to, sir.
[00:25] You said we signed up for it.
[00:28] In the end, it's going to be better and more true than Google can give you.
[00:35] Harper, I know you've been cooking up some stuff for us.
[00:40] What question do you have for us this week?
[00:45] So I ran across one and it seemed counter to what I would think it should actually be.
[00:54] So I thought, you know, my team is going to have to explain this to me.
[00:58] What is a crash course?
[01:01] It doesn't sound like it would be an effective example of itself.
[01:08] So can you give what you think the sort of definition is?
[01:14] So a crash course would be generally a quick and probably intense period of study in order to get up and running on something to increase knowledge, I would say.
[01:29] I like that.
[01:31] I'd say so.
[01:33] I always think a little bit that you're cutting corners because it's a shortened period of time where you're trying to get up and speed.
[01:44] A short runway?
[01:45] Yeah.
[01:46] Yeah, you're skipping the details.
[01:50] You're just hitting the highlights.
[01:52] But it always made sense to me, I guess, because it's like you're cramming a bunch of stuff into a small space of time or, you know, whatever.
[02:04] It's like a green area.
[02:06] And so that, to me, fit well with the visual of a car crashing or something like that.
[02:12] I don't know why that.
[02:13] But but now that you bring it up now, I wonder why it got that terminology.
[02:19] I'm a nomenclature.
[02:23] Well, and I'm wondering now if it's like if it's the course of something that's crashing or is it on a course where things crash?
[02:33] Does that make sense?
[02:34] Sure.
[02:35] Oh, yeah.
[02:36] So now I'm confused.
[02:37] I always said a driving school thing.
[02:39] Right.
[02:40] Yeah.
[02:41] Like, yeah.
[02:42] Are you driving around the course and then you crash or are you on a course to crash?
[02:49] I always thought it was more about like a course, like a class itself.
[02:55] But like, look, we're going to have this class that is going to be compressed and that sort of way.
[03:03] Not not more of a route you take kind of thing.
[03:07] OK, so so what you're saying is, would you be practicing crashing on this course?
[03:12] Is it like would the class itself be practicing crashing?
[03:19] I think it's just an inevitability because you're cutting corners and you're you're trying to do things in a way that's faster than they should be done in an ideal situation that you're just going to just make it happen in whatever way it is.
[03:34] And that's I always when Jason, when I think about it, I think about like I do think like just if it was somebody on a driving a car, but just like just running over obstacles in the way, you know, like these silly details like the the cones and things like that.
[03:51] They're just running right through that stuff because we're just trying to get there.
[03:56] So I love the visual of that.
[04:00] But I mean, if we're just we're of course is taking a class, right?
[04:04] So we've taken a class that we were taking and just crashed it, crushed it, made it.
[04:10] We are no longer getting the most out of it.
[04:13] We could.
[04:14] We've now crashed this course.
[04:16] I think what you're saying is it's maybe more like an analogy to a crash course, like the way that it's not that you crash the course, but like the way that the class is conducted is a crash course.
[04:33] I was wondering if it might come from the like the military or something like that, where they're like learning to drive tanks or whatever kind of vehicle and it's the military.
[04:44] So you have to like do it fast ish in basic training or something.
[04:48] And then be so you're like driving all of these stuff and you commonly crash or something like that.
[04:54] I'd always imagined aviation.
[04:58] At some point, all aircraft were experimental, right?
[05:03] And everything that comes off the line is an experiment.
[05:07] So when you do finally take it up to put it through its paces, there's a higher than normal chance of literally crashing that thing.
[05:22] That's a good. Yeah.
[05:25] But it would also make sense, potentially like so you may learn more from crashing than from successful iterations.
[05:34] So for cars, too, it may make sense to have a crash course, right?
[05:38] Where you intentionally set up a space in which to crash it to learn about it, which we do for safety ratings and such.
[05:49] I don't feel like independent car companies were doing that until very recently and forced to do so.
[05:57] So I don't know if that's a good place to find the genesis of the term.
[06:02] I would suggest probably military.
[06:11] Well, see, now I want to know that I want to know the origin of the word course, because there's now I mean, you know, like there's so many different iterations of it, honestly, right?
[06:23] So the course of a plane's trajectory versus the golf course versus the course in school, you know, like course of antibiotics.
[06:33] There you go. So now where's all this coming from?
[06:36] And I don't even know which course it's supposed to be.
[06:39] From recursive.
[06:42] I like your idea of aviation because I feel like I mean, what do you associate with things that crash?
[06:49] It's like planes and cars.
[06:51] Basically, those are your options.
[06:55] And bandicoots.
[07:01] Oh, who was the who there was a player.
[07:03] His name was crash.
[07:04] It was played on Charlotte.
[07:10] Oh, Gerald.
[07:13] Gerald Wallace.
[07:15] Well done, sir.
[07:17] Well, the Internet, but yeah.
[07:23] Harper, you were thinking like early days of aviation, like Orville and Wilbur, or like a little bit later, like military World War One World War Two ish.
[07:36] Yeah, that's a big gap of time, I guess.
[07:39] Yeah, I was maybe even thinking jet age.
[07:42] So maybe post World War Two or even NASA.
[07:47] Oh, NASA.
[07:51] OK, OK, what about what about missiles? Right there.
[08:00] The goal is to crash them.
[08:03] And you put them on a course to crash.
[08:06] I guess it would be more like a explosion course.
[08:11] Sure, rocketry. Same.
[08:13] Similar time frame.
[08:17] And same people doing it.
[08:18] People who do rockets also do airplanes.
[08:21] All right. Well, I'm going to go.
[08:23] I'm going Shakespeare.
[08:26] It's going to go hard, right?
[08:27] I like it.
[08:28] Yeah.
[08:30] Again, I like the aviation thing, but I think earlier, I think like World War One ish or something.
[08:37] We crashed a lot of planes in World War One.
[08:40] Yeah.
[08:44] Joey, what you got?
[08:46] Yeah, I think the plane plane thing seems like it's a good fit.
[08:56] First use as a noun is in the 1940s, 1949 in the Washington Post.
[09:06] But I can't figure out what it says.
[09:09] Since it was referring to aviation, the education meeting came about in the 50s.
[09:16] So what is language councils?
[09:20] It's a weird website.
[09:22] They claim that there isn't a consensus as to where the term originates from,
[09:26] but their favorite is that crash course stems from the term crash land,
[09:30] in which a landing has to be made in unfavorable circumstances,
[09:34] like a crash course urgent need, regardless of circumstances.
[09:39] So we've got to get our study on for this class.
[09:46] There's no option.
[09:48] So this article says that it was quoting the online etymology dictionary,
[09:56] saying that the term originated in 1958 and evolved from the term crash program.
[10:02] I don't know if that's not really very helpful.
[10:05] Well, kind of.
[10:07] So yeah, crash courses were crash preparations in aviation and military.
[10:14] So you're literally learning how to crash your plane, as you said earlier.
[10:20] And then that turns into a metaphorical, meaning intensive training on courses.
[10:27] So if you're part of a crash program, you're learning to crash and not crash, I assume.
[10:35] It seems like ideally not crash.
[10:39] Great.
[10:42] So crash course is literal, and then there was literally courses about crashing.
[10:49] That doesn't seem like there's a very satisfying answer for such a new phrase.
[10:53] Yeah, super new.
[10:56] Yeah, you figured that they'd be able to follow when it changed to metaphorical.
[11:04] But nonetheless, going to say that we nailed it.
[11:08] Oh, yeah.
[11:09] It was Shakespeare, right?
[11:11] So the idioms claims that the phrase crash course merged in the 20s and 30s.
[11:20] It started becoming common in the 20s and 30s as references to crash courses appeared in books, articles, and programs.
[11:29] Do we have a citation for that?
[11:31] We don't.
[11:33] But it says early uses indicated a merge in aviation and military training where pilots and soldiers needed to learn complex skills and procedures quickly.
[11:42] Crash courses were crash preparations.
[11:45] It's succinct, but not well-documented.
[11:50] Hastily teaching things like navigation, flight techniques, and combat strategies.
[11:54] Definitely something you just want to do hastily.
[11:57] Throw it all in there.
[12:00] Get out there, kid.
[12:02] Good luck.
[12:03] It does kind of sound like World War II.
[12:09] You know enough.
[12:10] Go kill some Germans.
[12:13] All right.
[12:14] I'd say we nailed it.
[12:15] Yeah.
[12:17] Nice.
[12:19] So Shakespeare it is, right, Coalson?
[12:21] Yep.
[12:22] Well, now I'm going to see.
[12:23] But I always had this visual of a practice race course where people were just smashing into the wall.
[12:29] So I don't know if I can keep that anymore.
[12:32] Go from demolition derby to airplane demolition derby?
[12:36] Yeah, fair enough.
[12:38] Yeah.
[12:39] Now I just have a plane crashing in a field, I guess.