Favourites

My favourite line in all of cinema is not the obvious. I don’t go with “Play it again, Sam” from Casablanca. (In fact that line wasn’t actually said. It was “Play it, Sam”.) Nor do I give the prize to Scarlett O’Hara: "I'll think about that tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day." 

My favourite comes from the first Superman movie. The scene is Niagara Falls. A little boy falls over a viewing platform (I think. He certainly fell over something). Suddenly Superman appears, flies under the boy, catches him successfully and takes him up to the hysterical parents (I think. Well, you would be hysterical if your child fell off the Falls, wouldn’t you.) As you can tell, my memories of the movie are less than precise. But the next bit is graven into my brain. There are two elderly ladies leaning over a fence watching this. One turns to the other and says: “Of course he’s Jewish.” My non-Jewish readers need to understand that proud Jewish mothers and grandmothers are a trope in American society. There is an infinity of jokes about Jewish mothers, who all want their sons to be doctors or lawyers or just about any profession of high status. In case you’re wondering, they don’t seem to have similar ambitions for their daughters; they just have to marry the doctor or the lawyer!

My second favourite quote comes from one of the Lord of the Rings movies, possibly the last one. The heroic band of ring rescuers are at a wall in the midst of battle with some obnoxiously ugly enemies. They need to get over the wall but Gimli the dwarf can’t make it.  Legolas the utterly beautiful elf person offers to give him a leg-up. Gimli snarls: “Nobody tosses a dwarf!”

My third favourite comes from Dirty Dancing when the equally beautiful Patrick Swayze says: “Nobody puts Baby in the corner." This precedes a fabulous dance routine which finishes off the movie.

I’m sure there are dozens more but the brain is resisting when I try to remember.

And now to more phrases of life – sorry, I just can’t help it!

Someone is said to be “sharp as a tack”, or “neat as a pin”. I get the first, but what is neat about a pin. Then there’s the saying “for two pins…” Why not “for two cans of beans” or “for two oranges”? For that matter, why “two” in the first place?

If you think someone is probably telling a bit less than the truth, you could “take it with a pinch (or grain) of salt”. Why salt? And while I’m on salt, why did the older members of my family throw a pinch of salt over their shoulder for some particular reason now lost to me. And there was some other superstition about putting a coin inside a handbag if you were giving it as a gift; I suppose the meaning if that is reasonably obvious. I think there were other superstitions too, but with the current brain resistance to remembering they aren’t coming back to me.

We say something is a pigsty if it’s a dirty mess; but we could equally say that same dirty mess is an Augean Stables.

We can be “sober as a judge”, which is perfectly understandable. We wouldn’t want someone presiding over affairs who was “as drunk as a lord”. But why are we said to be “as sick as a dog”? Where do dogs come in?

We can say a child is “a regular little bagpipe”; why not a flute, or a clarinet?

I was intrigued by the saying “close but no cigar”. So I checked on Encyclopaedia Google and found this: It comes from traveling fairs and carnivals from the 1800s. The prizes back then were not giant-sized stuffed teddy bears, they were usually cigars or bottles of whiskey. If you missed the prize at a carnival game, the carnie folk would shout, “Close! But no cigar!”

And Carolyn has suggested that the “all the ducks in a row” idea might refer to the rigid arrow pattern which some birds assume would make it easier to kill more of them.

Yesterday I found myself saying: “As right as rain”. What in earth is right about rain? It completely mystifies me.

Just to finish up, a gorgeous saying which came my way recently: “I’m not an early bird or a night owl, just a permanently exhausted pigeon.”

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations>

Playwright George Bernard Shaw: “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.”