To Wit

Say what you will about the NYT columnist Maureen Dowd, I find her at her best when she is requoting someone else. We get two benefits here. We get a great turn of phrase brought back to life that likely never made it into Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, that if it weren't for Ms. Dowd's memory we would never hear the phrase again, and we get it applied to a present day context that the original speaker could hardly have ever imagined.

Take today's screed on Newt Gingrich. Ms Dowd paraphrases Raymond Chandler to say that if brains were elastic, Rick Perry wouldn't have enough to make suspenders for a parakeet.

I'd love to know Chandler's context for that metaphor. One imagines he was referring to a thug, or an LAPD lieutenant. Perhaps both. I myself somewhat collect these kinds of gems when I encounter them in text.  I have preserved one from Chandler that goes to the effect that the playboy character Christopher Lavery was going back to the beach to lie in the sun and show the girls what they didn't necessarily have to go on missing.

Ms. Dowd once blended in someone's quote about their enmity toward Swifty Lazar, a Hollywood power agent who apparently was vertically challenged, when they told Swifty in some restaurant to go hang himself from a Bonsai tree.

One of my favorite ones gets a workout at this time of year and involves fruitcake. Russell Baker once declared that it was "the only food durable enough to become a family heirloom." My wife has a tendency to buy multiple packages of "goodies" then hides half of them in the kitchen or the pantry. When I have plowed my way through the visible ones I seek out the hidden ones.  This usually leads to some discussion that I wasn't supposed to eat whatever it was. It wasn't meant for me.  This of course leads me to leave a note on a half-consumed package of goodies that food was not meant to be a "family heirloom." She still hides food.

But, if points were being awarded, the first place award would go to Christopher Buckley for reminding us that Dorothy Parker, a Smith graduate, said of the girls at Bennington College that if they were laid end-to-end, she wouldn't be at all surprised.

I wonder if Ms. Dowd will ever get to use that one.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com/