"...relax and enjoy it" and manuscript forgery

[Jonathan Lighter]

Yes, Charlie, I agree.

  JL

Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Charles Doyle
Subject: Re: "...relax and enjoy it" and manuscript forgery
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Quite right, Jonathan: The proverbiality of the sentence "If rape is inevitable, you may as well relax and enjoy it" would entail its figurative extension or application to unpleasant experiences other than rape.

My intuition tells me, however, that the collocation "relax and enjoy" is way older than the rape joke/proverb, which ironically contextualizes it. But who knows . . . .

In any case, the phrase "relax and enjoy it" should probably not be regarded as proverbial UNLESS we can convince ourselves that all occurrences must be taken as allusions to the joke/proverb.

--Charlie
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 12:47:03 -0800
>From: Jonathan Lighter
>Subject: Re: "...relax and enjoy it" and manuscript forgery
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>I'm speaking of the phrase whose form is generally, "If rape is inevitable, you may as well relax and enjoy it." Over the years I've encountered the phrase and variants frequently enough (i.e., maybe a half dozen times, not including those reported here) that I feel safe in characterizing it as "proverbial," at least in the broad and fuzzy sense of that term employed by lexicographers.
>
> If taken literally, of course, the "proverbial advice" could only be another contribution of the sociopath commmunity to our national language. But it's clearly not intended to be taken literally. The idea - to belabor the obvious - is that if an unpreventable or unavoidable wrong is about to be done to you, you're better off putting up with it (and possibly turning it somehow to your advantage) than resisting to no purpose.
> Whether the phrase "relax and enjoy it"- all by itself - is a derivative of the longer statement is perhaps unknowable, but one has one's suspicions.
>
> Somewhat similar in its irony is the more recent, less optimistic, acronym "BOHICA," mentioned here some weeks ago, for "Bend over, here it comes again!" (over 18,000 raw Googlits). The elliptical allusion here is to some kind of extraordinary pedicatory rape (i.e., cruel victimization), perhaps by something in flight. One guesses that this was originally the punchline of a joke.
>
> The earliest Internet "BOHICA" that I see is from 1982: http://groups.google.com/group/net.jokes/msg/cb5383cfec7060a4 .
>
> JL
>

>Charles Doyle wrote:
>
>Whiting's _Modern Proverbs and Proverbial Sayings_ (#R75) and Mieder's _Dictionary of American Proverbs_ (p. 503) do give as a proverb the phrase "Relax and enjoy it." However, most of the citations don't refer to rape or sexual activity (one, from 1966 does).
>
>I can't remember whether anyone searched this matter when it came up several days ago, but the ealiest instance of the "rape" version I have found (after a hasty search)--such phrasing as "If rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it"-- comes from the presidential pen of Dwight Eisenhower, writing in the _Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science_ for 1959--what I take to be a parody of the saying (it appears inside quotation marks): "a little inflation is inevitable, relax and enjoy it."
>
>In 1965 Arthur B. Carson, author of _Foundation Construction_, wrote, ""Modern foundation experts have paraphrased an old saying ("When rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it") . . . ."
>
>The "rape" version is ironic, of course: it takes a fixed phrase of general application and applies it to grotesquely INAPPROPRIATE situation.
>
>But what exactly should we regard as PROVERBIAL here? The advice or admonition to "relax and enjoy" ANYTHING (a meal, an airline flight, the contorted prose of Henry James)--or a longer sentence that contextualizes "relax and enjoy" in reference to rape?
>
>--Charlie
>________________________________________
>
>---- Original message ----
>>Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 08:45:13 -0800
>>From: Jonathan Lighter
>>Subject: Re: "...relax and enjoy it" and manuscript forgery
>>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>>
>>
>>I've heard this "joke" (better described as a "proverb") with both "raped" and "screwed" (the latter punning on the sexual and the victimization sense).
>>
>> When I heard the "raped" version (in 1972), the context suggested that the speaker (a professor of American literature) had heard it in WWII.
>>
>> JL

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