A poke was a small bag. (Poke has the same origin as pocket and
pouch.)

A farmer would try to hide a cat in a poke and pass it off as a young
suckling pig. The farmer would warn the buyer not to open the bag
since the pig might get away.

If the buyer insisted on seeing the pig, the farmer would be forced
to open the poke and “let the cat out of the bag”!

The expression “pig in a poke” goes back to the 14th century.

We still use this expression today for accepting something we have
not fully checked out. The full expression is “buy a pig in a poke”.

Every parent probably thinks it applies to their kids, but there
really was a group known as “The Lost Generation”.

It was the time right after WWI, the war to end all wars. This was
the era that ended major monarchies and established new democracies.
It heralded the electronic media. It was the era where women were
seeking civil equality and unions were seeking economic equality.
Business was king and the industrial revolution was at its peak.

A group of talented authors and artists wrote about their feelings
of alienation. In part, their disillusionment was a result of
observing and surviving the horrific carnage caused by the Great War
and its mechanized lethal weapons, which had been spawned by the
industrial revolution.

Many of these authors chose to be expatriates in France between WWI
& WWII. They were rebellious and sought to end Victorian ideas. They
wanted to end censorship of sexuality and profanity and they included
Freudian ideas in their characters. “The Lost Generation” included
Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Henry Miller and
F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Gertrude Stein is credited with coining the phrase “The Lost
Generation”.

OK, this takes several explanations.

First, mechanical calculators were also called computers way back in
the 19th century.

Next, the first programmable device invented by Charles Babbage was
called the analytical engine. The programmer was said to be Ada
Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron. [1842]

As far as the modern computer is concerned . . . the first time the
word computer appears in print is in 1945. The term ENIAC means
electronic numerical integrator and computer. The term was printed
in the following title . . . “Description of the ENIAC and comments
on electronic digital computing machines”. J. Eckert et al. Note
that both computer and computing are in use as of 1945.

The term electronic brain does not appear until 1946.

The theoretical precursor to the modern computer was the Turing
machine described back in 1937. It was named after the mathematician
Alan Turing.
------------------------------
1945 - Grace Murray Hooper (Admiral USN) pulls a dead bug [moth]
from a broken computer relay on the Mark II computer at Harvard
University. She later glued the bug into a logbook of the computer
and this very first bug is still kept in the National Museum of
American History of the Smithsonian Institution. BTW, Continual
cleaning of the relays was referred to as "debugging" the computer.

Cop is short for copper, but it appears to have nothing to do with
the metal.

The word cop previously came into use in the early 1700s as slang
meaning to seize something or grab.

The use of cop [for copper] for a policeman began around 1859 and
was more in line with the above slang expression that the police
would “nab” or seize someone. “Copper” = “nabber”

Later, some police badges were made out of copper and some believe
that this is where the expression came from.

Basis Weight

The weight of a ream of paper in the basic size for that grade (e.g.
500 sheets of 20 Bond paper in its basic size, 17x22 in. [4
standard sheets], would weigh 20 lb.)

Sometimes the same paper is assigned two basis weights, e.g. 24/60,
meaning the same paper is sold in two different basis sizes. 24 lb.
bond (basis size 17"x22") is approximately the same weight as 60 lb.
text or offset (basis size 25"x38").

You should note that paper can have different densities and thus
different thickness are possible for the same weight – such as
cover stock!