Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?


log in or register to remove this ad

Also, apropos to our hobby and general nerd-dom, the famous CS Lewis quote, 'When I became a man I put away childish things' and its meaning-reversing continuation 'including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.'
This one is because "When I became a man I put away childish things" is the original, Lewis is playing on a bible verse there.
1 Corinthians 13:11, if I remember right.
"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
― 1 Corinthians 13:11

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
― C.S. Lewis
 

There are a bunch of aphorisms that people routinely get wrong, frequently by leaving something out that changes the meaning significantly.

"I could care less." - should be - "I couldn't care less." because you clearly want to state you don't care about something.

"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps." - Originally meant something that is simply impossible, because have you ever tried to pull your feet out of mud by yanking on your boots alone?

"Blood is thicker than water." - Full statement originally was "The blood of the Covenant is thicker than the water of the womb." Means exactly the opposite of what people use it for.

"The customer is always right." - People who like to use that expression either don't know, or don't want you to know, the rest: "... in matters of taste." So the customer is always right, unless they're wrong.

... and so on.
Malapropisms can be hilarious though.

Also, apropos to our hobby and general nerd-dom, the famous CS Lewis quote, 'When I became a man I put away childish things' and its meaning-reversing continuation 'including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.'
Such a great quote. Another, similar one from Doctor Who.

“There’s no point in being grown up if you can’t act a little childish sometimes.”
 



Remove ads

Top