The OED -- don't leave home without it

If blogging was old enough to have given rise to proverbs, one of them would probably be "He who posts last, posts best". Yesterday, SC discussed the fact that William Safire missed out on a fairly widespread usage of "pole" in ranting about "polar".

Today, Mark Liberman has given a much more in-depth, OED-informed treatment of the same topic. Your host is beginning to conclude that while free is good, comprehensive is better. However, at $295/year for individuals, and with no institutional subscription to make use of, your host will be sticking with Webster's.

Despite SC's engineering background, though, he can't understand the admittedly obscure joke at the end of this passage:

But maybe it's just as well. There are already lots of bad electrical-engineering puns about flights from Warsaw with Poles in the right half-plane, and a smaller number of references to "bipolar bears" in the mental health area. If resonance frequencies could be polar, then some really vile (if mercifully obscure) jokes about instabilities of arbitrage schemes would be inevitable.

The instability part makes sense if you know about Laplace transforms (the right half-plane joke). But the financial application (SC assumes that's the "arbitrage scheme" being referred to) eludes your host, and the reason why it would be particularly vile has got SC totally confused.