Sideswipe: October 12: The art of proposing

Reddit user took his girlfriend to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and proposed. Photo / Supplied

The art of proposing

Redditor krysxvi took his girlfriend Marybeth to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Hanging on the wall (with a Command strip, so as not to leave any damage) was a special artwork proposing to his girlfriend. Walking through the museum they came to a room of Picassos art - her favourite. His brother went in before him and surreptitiously managed to hang the painting of his brother proposing to his girlfriend who was wearing the red polka dot dress next to a Picasso. After I was given the signal I brought my girlfriend in ... she immediately began crying when she realised that the painting was of what was about to take place. I bent the knee and she nodded yes ... Her cousin, who had been undercover waiting for them to arrive, took photos of the moment. Soon after a less than happy guard told them to remove the painting from the wall and suggested that they leave. He adds: I knew shed be wearing that dress because I had her mother buy it a few weeks before and then convinced her to wear it that day. He didnt approach the museum beforehand, deciding it was easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

Words that dont mean what they used to

1. Husband: A husband was originally a home-owner or a head of a household - not necessarily a married one. At its root are words meaning home or dwelling and dweller or freeholder (an ancestor of bond). Wife, meanwhile, meant woman originally, a general meaning that still survives in words like housewife and midwife.

2. Describing something as livid originally meant that it was a grey-blue colour. It originally meant bruised or discoloured when it first began to be used in English in the early 1600s. In the 1920s it came to mean furiously angry - all of the colour draining from someones face.

3. No one knows where the word punk comes from, but its earliest meaning in English was as another name for a prostitute - it appears in Shakespeares Measure For Measure. Over the centuries, the word seems to have accrued a whole host of fairly unsavoury connotations, until it first began to be used of a petty criminal or a criminals assistant sometime around 1900, and ultimately any disreputable person, an outcast, or an inexperienced person in the 1920s and 30s.

4. Alienate is derived from the Latin word alienus, which was used to describe anything that was unfamiliar or foreign. And when alienate first appeared in English as a legal term in the mid-1400s, it meant to transfer ownership of some property over to someone else. (Source: Mental Floss)

Got a Sideswipe? Send your pictures, links and anecdotes to Ana at ana.samways@nzherald.co.nz