Great-Grandma Shell
My maternal great-grandma used to say of people who made asses of themselves, and whom she considered entirely worthless in all other respects, that they ought to be kicked so hard (that) birds would make a nest in their rear ends.
I thought it was a folk saying, but I've never found it used by any other folks.
Drunk as the lord
This expression is often misunderstood, especially by those encountering it with the word Lord capitalized, which is not only theologically blasphemous, but even worse, grammatically incorrect!
I recall that the correctly capitalized Lord supplied abundant wine at Cana when the guests were already quite drunk, but He is not reported to have drunk any of it himself.
No, the word lord, in the odd-sounding expression serving as header to this blog entry, is not to be capitalized, for it refers not to the Lord of the universe, but to the lord of a rather smaller abode, namely, the manor, hence an English lord, a man of the manor born, a man not nearly so well to do as God, but still a person of resources sufficient to waste the time and money required for getting drunk. Regularly.
Lawyer's Adage
Whether there's a will, there's a way.
Baby, it's cold inside.
If your heart got broken, it was ice-cold frozen.
When à la mode was all the rage!
When I was a ten-year-old hillbilly in the Arkansas Ozarks, we hillbillies generally didn't know French and thought that à la mode literally meant "with ice cream" because ordering a slice of apple pie à la mode got you a slice of apple pie with ice cream, so when I wanted ice cream alone, I would order, "Just à la mode," and because everybody was as ignorant as I was, I got what I wanted, namely, ice cream.
Until some of us learned, somehow, that à la mode meant "according to the fashion." In other words, whatever is fashionable.
I afterwards had to remind myself of the French expression's true meaning, so I would go around saying: "Remember the à la mode!"
Which sounded somehow vaguely nationalist and even anti-Mexican . . .
A Universe Designed for Intelligent Life
Velociraptors also contemplated the fine-tuning of the universe and argued that the universe seemed designed for the emergence of life, especially intelligent life, and they postulated a designer who cared for his well-designed creation and who cared particularly for velociraptors, the lords of this creation, whose existence he had prepared for by arranging a mass extinction event to open up the global environment for new creatures called dinosaurs, one species of which would eventually evolve into the velociraptor, a creature made in the designer's own carnivorous image.
Sweet dreams of resurrection day. There really will be demons there . . .
Low-Level Linguistics
Dialect: Where locution meets location.
Religious Tolerance?
"Unto me my religion, and unto you your religion . . . for a while."
Vampire Bugs
Don't you just have to love those old-time spray cans armed with insecticide so effective that the marketing experts made this promise: "Kills Bugs Dead"?
I sure prefer those more powerful pesticides of the past than today's environmentally friendly ones, which I suppose can only promise: "Kills Bugs Undead."
Tempting Fate
Confronted with a wishbone, I always like to screw around with fate by making my wish a wish to lose.
Comparing Apples and Oranges
I have just watched a video in which a Muslim-background Christian from Iran talks about her conversion to Pentecostal Christianity, and she speaks of the gift of tongues as an experience of "making love spiritually."
I leave to my readers the task of fleshing out just what those three words meant . . .
Gender Neutral Terms
According to Disrn:
"Royal Canadian Navy to replace 'seaman' rank title with gender-neutral term"
Gender neutral, eh? I'm guessing the new term won't be "ovum."
Postmodern Fairy Tale
Once upon a time they all lived happily ever after deconstructing this remnant of patriarchy eternally giving themselves something endlessly to improve upon but constructing a sentence like this unreadable one that goes on and on promising ever more but giving ever less in part because they never learned about proper punctuation that would . . .
Emna Charqui's so-called "Sardonic Verses"
Jihad Watch reports Emna Charqui, a blogger in Tunisia, sentenced to six months in prison for a satirical post about Covid-19 written in a Koranic style. Below is an imaginative reconstruction, though written more in the biblical style of the King James Version, borrowed from here.
Here are Emna Charqui's so-called "Sardonic Verses":
A-Lot saith:
"And if thou disbelieve'st these verses,
they become viruses versus thee!
Many disbelieved in the past -
not that they disbelieved in the past -
nay, they did not doubt the past,
the reality of the past, I mean.
Rather, they disbelieved A-Lot and her Epistle.
And their disbelief became
a pandemic of pantheistic pandaemonianism!
And they all died a death!
And that death was great!
No, I do not mean that it was wonderful.
Pay attention! I mean many!
In fact, all! They are all dead!
Or most of them.
Of the recent past, some are still living.
So far.
But Judgement Day is nigh.
On that day - as I was saying -
these verses will become viruses versus thee,
every one of thee!
And each verse shall stand up
and proclaim thee a disbeliever
who must die the second death.
And great will be that death!
Yes, great meaning many. I said that before.
Don't interrupt. I, A-Lot, hate interruptions!"
That's it. Emna Charqui's full text. Translated, of course. It's on the internet. I'll look for a link.
Two Different Americans in Conversation:
A Hillbilly Uncle in the Ozarks: "I had a barn to burn."
A Harvard Graduate Visiting the Ozarks: "I never heard of having a barn to burn."
Question: Is either exult or exalt in some way an antonym to insult?
Answer: No, nobody would insult either of those two terms.
Masters of the World
According to Mohammad Nouh Qudah, Jordanian MP:
"When the Arabs received Islam, it came with the idea that they are the masters of the world . . . Allah created . . . Arabs with thought and guidance and He created the other peoples as students who follow our guidance. They are the ones who should work. This way, our thought and their work complement each other, and this is how the world is built . . . We are the masters of the world . . . [Allah] instilled in the Arabs traits of leadership that He did not bestow upon others."
As reported in MEMRI TV Clip No. 8139.
Petrified!
Rock Candy.
That was then. This is now.
Then: "There is no compulsion in religion."
Now: "There is so compulsion in religion."
If I had a hammer . . .
IF:
"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Anonymous
"To a man with a nail, everything looks like a f**king big scary hammer." Really Anonymous
For Frederick Douglass
My friend Big Hominid wrote a post critical of whoever tore down the statue of Frederick Douglass. I joined in his anger and wrote this:
The folks pulling down those statues of Grant, Douglass, and Lincoln are doing this for their own sadistfaction.
Yes, I know how to spell "satisfaction." (But how does one link with this new Blogger formatting? Oh, here it is.)
Original Spengler
Thought on Spengler's Decline of the West:
Spengler's concept of culture is so profoundly pessimistic that it amounts to fatalism: birth, accomplishments, decline, death. Nothing can alter the sequence and its conclusion. From beginning to end, it's BADD!
But I would argue that if Spengler's system is right, it is also wrong. His fatalism is undone by the fact that we make history, we can analyze his system, and we can therefore subvert the fatalism.
Wastrel Hours
Extra Spirituality
He greatly craved the beer, the wine,
the wastrel hours, wasted fine.
Many a glass he raised on high;
many a drunken flight he'd fly.
But waking was as Housman said:
"The spirits of the night are dead."
He never said quite that, I grant,
but he'd not dis it on a rant.
That's my wisdom, and that's my ken;
I know that you'll be back again.
I'm still trying to get used to the new formatting process that Blogger demands I use. I must be doing something wrong because "Preview" doesn't work for me.
Labels: A. E. Housman, Extra Pound
Eins, zwei, g'suffa
Extra Drinks
Oh so sad was the fact Pound got wasted,
so much so that his face got hard pasted,
stuck fast to the floor's
worn spot where the doors'
swinging, ass-biting range got bums tasted.
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 11:55 PM 0 comments
No Quarter Given: Discuss!
Lots of people, for some reason, have recently been discussing the meaning of the expression "no quarter given." I added an anecdote to one of those discussions about my experience that I thought might be relevant to the topic. I was the Grit newsboy in my hometown as a kid. I sold copies all over town, to every household that would buy one. My goal was to sell 200 copies per week, but I think I reached only 185 in my three years of selling. I had no bicycle. That was beyond my means. I therefore walked all over town every Saturday, and that took all day. The pay wasn't great. At that time, a copy cost 15 cents, and I got to keep a nickel. The Saturday saleswalk exhausted me, so I stayed home to rest when deliveries were finished. Sundays, everything shut down, so I couldn't entertain myself spending my hard-earned nickels. I used to imagine wealth in coins. If only a copy were 75 cents instead of 15. Since I received a third of the price, I'd have gotten 25 cents per sale, but the price was not 75 cents, so no quarter was given . . .