I’m happy as a clam to see the idiom famine is over. Now we can ring the curtain down on the whole sorry affair. Make no mistake, old age pensioners and teenagers will be dancing in the streets. It’s the end of an era. A day that will go down in history. Will there be other famines? It remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: Life goes on. (Aaaaackk!)
Yep, epoch-making, not a word of a lie.
Wombat,
You forgot to leverage your benchmark and drill down to the bottom line of the data.
Mike
Yes. A lost art.
I remember the day when “He/she gives good interface” was a positive, if somewhat racy, recommendation. Then corporatespeak took over. Beige, beige times, these.
It can be quite hard to give everybody good interface when you’re working the room.
“Happy as a clam … .”
One of my favorites. Can anyone tell us the original, perfectly logical saying this is abbreviated from?
Best wishes,
Jerry
You mean this one?
Origin
An early version is ‘as happy as a clam at high water’. Clams are free from the attentions of predators at high tide, so perhaps that’s a reason to consider them happy then. The earliest known citation doesn’t mention water though. That’s in Harvardiana, 1834:
“That peculiar degree of satisfaction, usually denoted by the phrase ‘as happy as a clam’.”
Here’s a lovely poem to celebrate clam happiness . . . or happiness with clams . . .
John G. Saxe, the American writer best known for his poem The Blind Men and the Elephant, used the phrase in his Sonnet to a Clam, in the late 1840s:
Inglorious friend! most confident I am
Thy life is one of very little ease;
Albeit men mock thee with their similes,
And prate of being “happy as a clam!”
What though thy shell protects thy fragile head
From the sharp bailiffs of the briny sea?
Thy valves are, sure, no safety-valves to thee,
While rakes are free to desecrate thy bed,
And bear thee off, - as foemen take their spoil,
Far from thy friends and family to roam;
Forced, like a Hessian, from thy native home,
To meet destruction in a foreign broil!
Though thou art tender, yet thy humble bard
Declares, O clam! thy case is shocking hard!
I just love the part about being forced like a Hessian to meet destruction in a foreign broil. Not the forcing and broiling, you understand, but the literary-ness of it.
John G. Saxe turns out to have written some interesting musings on animals. Wonder what else he wrote . . . ?
At the end of the day, excessive use of idioms, is more than just overly idiomatic; it’s idiotic, so I’m out of here.
A couple months ago I watched a student-led opera production where the best vocalist there was a morbidly obese woman. She had the kind of voice that made you stop what you were thinking about and simply listen to her. And she did indeed have the final little part, then the show was over. It reminded me of that phrase.
You know she was thinking about everybody else thinking it. Amazing discipline to get through it.
A nurse from Mississippi heard a recording of herself giving change of shift report when I was in the Air Force and she remarked, “Oh ma gawd, ah soun’ like a mule eatin’ briars.” That left an impression on me.
Tony