Beadhead. Jeans I was wearing last night. Sensitivity to the light creeping in from the basement windows. Episodes of Family Guy on DVD. Empty cans clank as I put my feet up on the coffee table my friends and I sat so merrily around a few hours ago.
But now it is morning, and before checking our phones and stepping outside to begin our lazy day, we let our hangovers subside with back-to-back-to-back episodes of mindless cartoons.
And in a mindless segue of Family Guy, I learned where we get the term, “what a crock!”
Or at least I thought I did. The phrase isn’t from a crocodile who stands out in a group of alligators as Seth McFarlane supposedly enlightened me. In fact, the phrase comes from a time when indoor plumbing wasn’t so prevalent. The Brits used “thunder mugs” made of crockery (glass) materials. In the middle of the night, when going to an outhouse was out of the question, they did their business in the crocks. The original phrase is, “what a crock [of $hit]!”
So I’ve been doing a lot of driving during the break. My iPod car adapter has been a savior. The other day I was listening to Neil Young’s “Turnstiles” where he sings about all the bush-league (or is it busch-league?) batters, who are left to die on the diamond. What is this bush-league he sings about?
According to the Internet, bush league literally refers to minor league baseball teams who don’t have a major league affiliate. These teams didn’t have stadiums – their fields were confined by trees and bushes in the outfields. Nowadays, bush league is used to refer to anything that is amateur, crude or inferior.
At a party, freshman year, I heard an upperclassman scoff at a light beer: “Uh, gross. Bush league.” For a while, I was under the impression that the light beer was Busch Light and the phrase spurred from there. Apparently I was wrong. Thanks for the heads-up, Internet.
And how about the phrase, “have your cake and eat it too”? Wikipedia tells me “it is most often used negatively, meaning an individual consuming, exhausting, taking advantage of or using up a particular thing and, then, after that thing is gone or no longer reasonably available, still attempting to benefit from or use it.”
Let’s contextualize: Joe Lieberman has the floor, or “his cake,” but his speaking time expired, so he “ate it.”
I never use this phrase, though. I prefer the colloquial – “hey, quit being a dick!”
