On occasion I come across an expression that really catches my attention. Often, it’s a turn of phrase that, for whatever reason, makes me laugh. Sometimes it’s simply a word rarely used today.
I’ve taken to jotting these down to share later. So, here is my latest collection.
The Butterfly Speaks!
From the Australian TV series, Please Like Me, some of the characters are waiting to go in to see a high school musical that is a Shakespeare play set to music. I know. Sounds dreadful. As the crowd is waiting to go into the school, a character, presumably from the musical they are about to see, is flitting about. He is dressed in a very colorful leotard with beautiful butterfly wings1 . Yes, he is supposed to be a butterfly, entertaining the waiting crowd.
As the crowd began to move into the school, the butterfly liltingly flitted across the screen in the background almost like a ballet dancer. You could barely hear him saying, “I must seek fresh dewdrops over there!” The scene was so short, so unexpected, and so off-the-cuff, it was hysterical. I had to write it down; so, I dictated it on my phone using Siri.
Steve then said, “You know autocorrect didn’t get that right. You’ve got to see what it actually wrote.” I checked. He was correct. “I must seek fresh dude drops over there!” Another round of laughs.
Are You Saved?
We were watching the BBC series Endeavor, about the young Inspector Morse. A religious zealot asked the young detective, “Are you saved?” Without missing a heartbeat the inspector replies, “More like squandered, I should think.”
Also from Endeavor
And from the same series in a different episode, the inspector was asked is he were going to pursue an advanced degree from Oxford. He replied, “Like innocence and hope for humanity, I count that among the lost things.”
Aunt Helen Ivey (1921 – 2015)
Peering into Helen Ivey’s lifetime of journals is glancing back in time through the delightful and particular lens of her life experiences and is a constant source of entertainment, joy, and at present youthful exuberance. Steve shares her journal entries with the world on his Facebook page. She has reminded us of some wonderful words rarely heard today, such as: “catsy” and “mollycoddled.” Today she wrote of a snow storm decades now past, “Shoveled my way out of the house, promptly enfeebling myself for the rest of the day.”
This reminded me of the time I saw several people dressed as butterflies in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park. They were promoting a new release of the Windows operating system. ↩