Suggestive Names

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Tue Jun 13 13:50:09 UTC 2006


At 9:27 AM -0400 6/13/06, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>     I'm too fucking busy, and vice versa.
>
>Actually, we've discussed this on the list; it's a mot attributed to
>Dorothy Parker ("Tell him I'm too fucking busy, and vice versa").  As
>I recall, there was the usual debate over whether this was an actual
>or apocryphal witticism--in either case, it is at least the classic
>"mot d'escalier".
>
Actually, I can't find it on the archive--"You can lead a
horticulture but you can't make her think", "You're the young man who
doesn't know how to spell 'fuck'", and so on, but not the above.  But
it does seem to be standardly attributed to her, in particular as a
response to an editor who was dunning her about a deadline.  Fred, do
you have this one in YDOQ?

On a related topic, there's a commercial getting a lot of play for
Burger King on behalf of a product that has evidently morphed from
"Big Buckin Chicken" to "Big Huckin Chicken", although it's hard not
to hear it as something else.  See
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Burger+King+Big+Huckin+Chicken&btnG=Google+Search
for discussion.  I don't quite know how they get away with it.

Larry

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