Monday, August 22, 2011

Good godfreys mighty and more

"What's that got to do with the price of beans?"
"What's that got to do with the -- ?" is an expression which is used to denote something which is unrelated to the current topic of discussion.

A common form "what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?", is a retort to an irrelevant suggestion. This facetious usage implies that the topic under discussion might as well be the price of tea in China for all the relevance the interlocutor's suggestion bears on it. It has been said that this expression has stemmed from economists, who describe everything economic as affecting everything else, trying to find an expression which denotes the farthest logical connection from their current economic focus. In this way, the price of tea in China was used to denote the farthest possibility. It can also be used to denote an irrelevant topic.

In the United States, the phrase "What's that got to do with the price of eggs?" has been in use since the 1920s. The variance "of tea in China" seems to date from the 1940s and may be influenced by the idiom All the Tea in China. The British equivalent is "What's that got to do with the price of fish?" or "What's that got to do with the price of meat?". A Scottish variation is "What's that got to do with the price of cheese?"

There is also the derivative form of "what does that have to do with the price of rice in China," due to the common association between countries of Asia and rice. This variant was famously used in the 1976 film, Network. Another derivative form is "What's that got to do with the price of beans in Albuquerque?"

The six of us spke like a carefully trained Greek chorus.
A Greek chorus is a homogenous, non-individualised group of performers in the plays of classical Greece, who comment with a collective voice on the dramatic action. It originally consisted of fifty members which were later reduced to twelve by Sophocles, then increased to fifteen members by Euripides in tragedies. There were twenty-four members in comedies, and it performs using several techniques, including singing, dancing, narrating, and acting.

"Was there any cars goin' along the beach or parked there round the lane then?"
"Uh, huh. Lots of spooners."
People in their parked cars were "spooning" - caressing each other - but probably not going so far as to have actual sex.

"You wouldn't notice it in that pullman car you've been rolling around in."
Asey is comparing Miss Prudence' car to the Pullman car of a train.
The sleeping car or sleeper (often wagon-lits) is a railway/railroad passenger car that can accommodate all its passengers in beds of one kind or another, primarily for the purpose of making nighttime travel more restful. The first such cars saw sporadic use on American railroads in the 1830s and could be configured for coach seating during the day. Some of the more luxurious types have private rooms, that is to say fully and solidly enclosed rooms that are not shared with strangers.

The man who ultimately made the sleeping car business profitable in the United States was George Pullman, who began by building a luxurious sleeping car (named Pioneer) in 1865. The Pullman Company, founded as the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1867, owned and operated most sleeping cars in the United States until the mid-20th century, attaching them to passenger trains run by the various railroads; there were also some sleeping cars that were operated by Pullman but owned by the railroad running a given train. During the peak years of American passenger railroading, several all-Pullman trains existed, including the 20th Century Limited on the New York Central Railroad, the Broadway Limited on the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Panama Limited on the Illinois Central Railroad, and the Super Chief on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway.

Pullman cars were normally a dark "Pullman green," although some were painted in the host railroad's colors. The cars carried individual names, but usually did not carry visible numbers. In the 1920s the Pullman Company went through a series of restructuring steps, which in the end resulted in a parent company, Pullman Incorporated, controlling the Pullman Company (which owned and operated sleeping cars) and the Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Company. In 1947, in consequence of an antitrust verdict, a consortium of railroads bought the Pullman Company from Pullman Incorporated, and from then on railroads owned and operated Pullman-made sleeping cars themselves. Pullman-Standard continued in the manufacture of sleeping cars and other passenger and freight railroad cars until 1980.


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