[Ads-l] Plate Glass Skip - like Monday Morning Quarterback

[Laurence Horn]

Very nice!  I would also count “20-20 hindsight” in this family of expressions, and “backseat driver” as a cousin.    

LH

> On Sep 22, 2020, at 8:12 PM, Peter Reitan <pjreitan at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> We've discussed "Monday Morning Quarterback" here before.  Ben Zimmer wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal last year, and I've posted twice about it on my blog.
> 
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2016-December/145513.html
> 
> My first post was about the earliest use of "Monday Morning Quarterback" in 1931.
> 
> My second post was about all sorts of predecessor idioms, including "Grandstand Quarterback," "Cigar Store Quarterback," "Sunday Morning Quarterback," and "Drugstore Quarterback," as well as numerous later variants including "Radio," "TV," "Living Room," and "Drugstore."
> 
> In a post here and in his column, Ben Zimmer noted similarities with earlier idioms like "Armchair critic/strategist/general" and "Armchair warriors."
> 
> I recently stumbled across "Plate Glass Skip," three decades earlier than MMQ, which led me to uncover a whole slough of earlier second-guessing and similar idioms.  The earliest I found was "arm-chair politician" (1820).  Later examples included combinations and iterations of places from which someone was second guessed (armchairs, easy chairs, crossroads, curbstones, soap boxes, cracker barrels and the plate glass at a curling rink) and people being second guessed (politicians, generals, soldiers, managers, umpires, coaches, quarterbacks and the skip on a curling team).
> 
> Plate glass skip was mentioned as early as 1903, in an account of a tour by Scottish curlers through Canada.  The latest example I've seen in print was as recently as 2006.
> 
> [Excerpt] Edinburgh, Scotsman. “Plate-glass skips” is a phrase with which the Scottish curlers have become familiar in their progress through Canada.  These are the curling equivalents of arm-chair politicians.  When the matches are being played in the covered rinks out here these gentlemen seat themselves in the comfortable parlors which overlook the rinks, and are protected from the cold by plate-glass fronts.[End Excerpt]
> 
> Ottawa Journal (Ottawa, Canada), March 14, 1903, page 17.
> 
> I've posted a draft post about the various combinations and iterations, with tangents into  the history of cracker barrels, "hot stove" baseball leagues and soap boxes.
> 
> https://esnpc.blogspot.com/2020/09/cracker-barrels-hot-stoves-and-soap.html
> 
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