snowclone: Today ___, tomorrow the world

[Wilson Gray]

Damn! In my day, we had to do policing by hand! The sergeant would
say: "Start bending and picking! I don't want to see nothing but
assholes and elbows!"

-Wilson

On 10/14/07, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      snowclone: Today ___, tomorrow the world
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Today ___, tomorrow the world
>
> Google reports about 242,000 hits for "tomorrow the world".
>
> Original: "Today Germany, tomorrow the world!", a translation of the Nazi
> party slogan "Heute Deutschland, morgen die Welt!" (1, 2)
>
> According to a post in the Mudcat Forum (3), it "is a citation from the
> chorus of a song (from 1932?):" "Es zittern die morschen Knochen" by Hans
> Baumann (4, 5). The refrain is
>
> Wir werden weiter marschieren
> > Wenn alles in Scherben f=E4llt,
> > Denn heute da h=F6rt uns Deutschland
> > Und morgen die ganze Welt.
> >
>
> (so, not so much a citation as perhaps an allusion) --  which, if my
> undergraduate German serves me, means approximately
>
> We will march on
> > (even) if everything falls to pieces,
> > for today Germany hears us
> > and tomorrow the whole world.
> >
>
> But "da h=F6rt uns" 'hears us', as printed here, may well either be a
> softening of "geh=F6rt uns", or have been understood as "da geh=F6rt uns",
> 'belongs to us' (6).
>
> My first encounter with this snowclone was in (IIRC) William Steig's _The
> Lonely Ones_ (7), the great cartoonist's first book, published 1942: a G.I.
> collecting litter with litter bag, spiked stick, and a bitter expression,
> mutters "Today the area, tomorrow the world!" I was probably younger than 1=
> 0
> and didn't know the phrase "policing the area", much less the original
> slogan.
>
> m a m
>
> 1.
> http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalsozialistische_Deutsche_Arbeiterpa=
> rtei;
> scroll down to Slogans
> 2. http://movies.go.com/tomorrow-the-world/d787709/drama
> 3. http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=3D55750; search for
> "translation", in the post by "Wolfgang" of 24 Feb 2003.
> 4. http://ingeb.org/Lieder/eszitter.html
> 5. http://www.kollektives-gedaechtnis.de/texte/vor45/lieder.html
> 6. http://schmautz.gmxhome.de/nachd.htm, bottom of page
> 7. http://www.valleybooks.net/cgi-bin/valleybooks/14034.html
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org