|
Type-A bureaucrat who professionally pushes papers in the Middle East. History nerd, linguistic geek, and devoted news junkie.
|
These days, it’s not uncommon to see a white person joining the Black-founded Greek organizations of the Divine Nine. Though, have you ever wondered who was the first to bite the bullet? Let us introduce Joan Mulholland, the first white woman to join Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and trust us, she was a force to be…
Hovertext:
Blistering Cheeks of Christ is copyright Zach Weinersmith, all rights reserved.
Steaming from New York to the Azores in 1867, Mark Twain noted a curious companion overhead:
We had the phenomenon of a full moon located just in the same spot in the heavens at the same hour every night. The reason of this singular conduct on the part of the moon did not occur to us at first, but it did afterward when we reflected that we were gaining about twenty minutes every day because we were going east so fast — we gained just about enough every day to keep along with the moon. It was becoming an old moon to the friends we had left behind us, but to us Joshuas it stood still in the same place and remained always the same.
(From The Innocents Abroad.)
I say it's spinach (sometimes given in full as "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it" or further abbreviated to just "spinach") is a 20th-century American idiom with the approximate meaning of "nonsense" or "rubbish". It is usually spoken or written as an anapodoton, with only the first part of the complete phrase ("I say it's spinach") given to imply the second part, which is what is actually meant: "I say the hell with it."(Broccoli was a relative novelty at that time, just then being widely introduced by Italian immigrant growers to the tables of East Coast cities)"The spinach joke" quickly became one of the New Yorker cartoon captions to enter the vernacular (later examples include Peter Arno's "Back to the drawing board!" and Peter Steiner's "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"), becoming a bon mot of the 1930s, with continued, though diminishing, use into the early 21st century.Irving Berlin's song "I Say It's Spinach (And the Hell with It)", which appeared in the 1932 musical Face the Music, used the full phrase: "Long as I'm yours, long as you're mine/Long as there's love and a moon to shine/I say it's spinach and the hell with it/The hell with it, that's all!" [YouTube here]In Britain in the 19th century, "spinach" also meant "nonsense". This is presumably a coincidence, with an entirely different origin. Dickens uses the phrase "gammon and spinach" in this sense with Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield (published in 1849) saying "What a world of gammon and spinnage it is though, ain't it!" ("spinnage" being a now-obsolete variant of "spinach")
It’s Kendrick Lamar’s world and we’re all living in it. Fresh off his five Grammy wins, Lamar just performed at the 2025 Super Bowl Apple Music Halftime Show, breaking the internet for the umpteenth time since his back and forth with Drake began last year. Perhaps one of the best victory laps in rap history, Lamar…
Log in
reply
