Greatest Hits and Obscure B Sides

I remember the first time I read Hamlet. I thought: "This Shakespeare sure uses a lot of cliches." And the first time I read Julius Caesar I laughed when I read "it was Greek to me." It just seemed so odd in context.

Our colloquial language is full of Shakespeare. The Bible, too. Ben Franklin. The funny thing about these quotes is that they are so familiar, it no longer occurs to us that they are quotes. Even when their syntax is decidedly marked: "murder most foul," or when they are metaphorically resonant: "in my mind's eye."

It's hard to imagine these as invented combinations. We use them just like words--like they are an indivisible part of the language. It is as surprising to read them as an orginal poetic utterance as it would be to learn that someone invented the word "tree."

Well, maybe not quite as surprising.

But it's strange to think how different the status of these expressions is in contrast to the quotes where we recognize that we're quoting (even if we don't always know what we're quoting). We recognize, for instance, that "the lady doth protest too much" is in quotes. Knowing that it is in quotes give the utterance an air of either pomposity or, more usually, irony.

But what I'm thinking about today is the transition period--the residual quotation marks. Phrases that we still recognize as being sort of in quotes, but which are used so frequently that they are starting to have the status of a "in the twinkling of an eye" or "the face that launched a thousand ships" or "salad days." That is, phrases that we use without the implicit quotation marks.

So, these are phrases that are in quotation marks for some people, but not for others. We really never are having the same conversation.

The ones I can think of are mostly from the 19th and 20th century, which I guess makes sense. The language would not draw attention to itself--it wouldn't sound Biblical or Shakespearean or Marlovian or whatever. Not only do we not often recognize where these come from, we often don't recognize that they come from anywhere.


march to the beat of your own drummer

hitch your wagon to a star

To begin, begin.

They fuck you up, your Mom and Dad.

anal (as in "Lighten up Feemus, don't be so anal.")

class consciousness

suspension of disbelief

time is money

military industrial complex


There is something interesting in these phrases severed from their context, un-quoted, as it were. By being unquoted, they cease to embed themselves within a particular text or a particular moment. They acquire the patina of meaning, of something that transcends the situatedness of their original utterance. They achieve their permanence only by being misunderstood. There's some cool metaphor or meaning there--I'm not sure what it is.

As somebody smarter than me once said: there is no apotheosis that is not preceded by a death.

True dat, as the kids say.

P.S. I'm sure the kids don't say that anymore. As soon as I know what the kids are saying, they're saying something else. It's totally bogus. Ya dig?

p.p.s. The answers:

Thoreau
Emerson
Wordsworth
Larkin
Freud
Marx? Lukacs?
Coleridge
Franklin
Eisenhower