"Watching grass grow" (Damon Runyon?)

[Jason Norris]

I like that one. I had not heard it before. There are a couple of similar phrases I have heard.

"It's like watching mud dry."

or

"It's like watching paint dry."

Or sometimes, "I'd rather watch mud dry." Funny thing, the guy who said that was on vacation in Disney World. But then, he was a chaperone for a bunch of high school kids. Maybe even Disney was boring for him.

Jason


Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Bapopik at AOL.COM
Subject: "Watching grass grow" (Damon Runyon?)
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WATCHING GRASS GROW--12,000 Google hits, 3,330 Google Groups hits
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I was just watching the Knicks game. It wasn't like watching grass grow. It
was more like watching a train wreck. But let's discuss the grass.
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Not in OED? Not in HDAS? Not in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations? Does
Fred want an exact Runyon cite?
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(PROQUEST HISTORICAL NEWSPAPERS_

_This Morning...; This Morning . . . _
(http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=1&did=121326913&SrchMode=1&sid=1&Fmt=10&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=HNP
&TS=1107596981&clientId=65882)
With Shirley Povich. The Washington Post and Times Herald (1954-1959).
Washington, D.C.: Sep 22, 1958. p. A14 (2 pages)
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Page onr:
NEWPORT, R. I., Sept. 21--Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls was merely one of
America's legacies from that fine impressionist. He once wrote into a ten-word
sentence a description of yacht racing that has gone ringing down through the
years as the model of scorn for that esoteric sport with its spinnakers,
liffs, jibs, jibes and complete reliance on windy drafts.
...
Runyon was reporting his first America's Cup race. It was a switch from his
world of the violence of the fight camps, the crash of the World Series home
runs, the race track whirl of fast horses and whipping riders, and the
body-assaults of football. To the slow moving yacht races he reacted with
impatience. "Watching an America's Cup race," he wrote, "is like watching grass grow."


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If we knew what we were doing,
it wouldn't be called research,
would it?

 -- Albert Einstein