Before Alfred Kinsey took up human sexuality, he studied wasps — thousands and thousands of them, whose bodies he minutely examined. Yet when asked what he could say about The Wasp, he replied that he hadn’t really seen enough specimens to generalize.
David berreby, “Quelle Différence?” slate, SEPT 11, 1996
From a long-time favorite novel, Steven Minkin’s A No Doubt Mad Idea:
“On to the library. And all through his time at the card catalog, combing the shelves, filling out the request cards, he danced a silent, flirtatious minuet of the eyes with a rosy-cheeked redhead in the biology section, pages of notes spread before her. All his life, he had had a yen for women in libraries. In a cerebral setting, the physical becomes irresistible. Also, he figured he was really more likely to meet a better or at least more compatible woman in a library than in a saloon. Ought to have singles libraries, with soups and salads, Bach and Mozart, Montaignes bound in morocco; place to sip, smoke, and seduce in a classical setting, noon to midnight. Chaucer’s Salons, call them, franchise chain.”
“You know what they say: ‘A kitchen divided against itself… that dog won’t hunt.’” — Ben Napier, Home Town
Lexicon. Björk discusses her notebook of lyrics. “This is the lyric to a song about my best mate, Jóga. But all the other pages? There’s absolutely no way I’ll open for you, whatever you offer me. Because that’s so private it’s scary. And I’ve got a beautiful little secret code which is called ‘Icelandic,’ so you guys will never find out what it says in this.”
Lexicon. Derived from this bit in Steve Martin’s 1991 movie, L.A. Story:
L’Idiot is the hot restaurant of the moment, and pronounced as if French (as one might expect from the apostrophe). The phrase is generally used when someone is being a dick.
“I see Congress has cut Medicaid spending.”
“Part of the New Cruelty?”
Interestingly, the New Cruelty also shows up with lightning speed in this deleted scene that featured John Lithgow:
Lexicon. From the movie Casablanca. Once, I would have thought this was such a widely seen film I wouldn’t need to explain, but as the years go by, even societal memory fades.
Like many quotes from this movie, somewhat mangled. It should be, “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world… she walks into mine.” The towns, alas, get dumped.
Usage: Something incredibly rare and unexpected happens.
“My god!”
”What?”
”That car that just cut us off, like an asshole?”
”Yeah?”
”It’s a Bugatti Veyron.”
(respectful pause) “Of all the gin joints, in all the world…”
Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks.
Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics—and they are mostly clever fools—seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way.
Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can.
— Calculus Made Easy, Silvanus Thompson, 1914 (yes, still in print)
Borrowed from our friends David Levine and Kate Yule. It’s a line from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Indy: Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?
Sallah (peering into the tomb): Asps. Very dangerous. (pause) You go first.
Usage:
“That rhino snot pie on the menu looks interesting.”
”Asps.”
(Kate died in 2016. We miss her a lot.)
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Hocus Pocus
This has been bouncing around for a while, but as far as I can tell Hugh MacLeod, the brilliant scribbler and crafter of bon mots said it first in May of 2022.
The Metaverse is The Segway of our time.
What else can you say of something even the developers refuse to use?