[Ads-l] "twisted steel and sex appeal"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Coincidence?

1940 _Lehigh Review_ (Graduation Issue) 27: I wanta go back to Bethlum
where they’re warm and friendly folk ;/ Where Bethlum Steel and Sex Appeal
have filled the town with smoke.

JL

On Sat, Oct 21, 2023 at 1:28 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 1966 _Bomb_ (Virginia Military Institute) 148: Early each morning John
> sucks up enough courage from his cigarettes to give his 137 lbs. of twisted
> steel and sex appeal momentum for the day.
>
> 1969 _Lucky Bag_ (U.S. Naval Academy) 401: One hundred and twenty-five
> pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal.
>
> 2001 Bill Sammon _At Any Cost_ (Washington, D.C.: Regnery) 137: The USS
> Tarawa, an amphibious assault ship that Russell liked to refer to as
> "40,000 tons of twisted steel and sex appeal."
>
> JL
>
> On Sun, Nov 19, 2006 at 8:04 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
>> And they say ESP ain't real !  This phrase, which I brought to your
>> attention many months ago, came to mind and a Google search just now finds
>> this article from today's Charleston (S.C.) _Post and Courier_:
>>
>> http://www.charleston.net/assets/webPages/departmental/news/Stories.aspx?section=sports&tableId=119238&pubDate=11/19/2006
>> .
>>
>> The writer associates the phrase with the recently deceased Rocco Monroe
>> DiGrazio, 75, who wrestled professionally under the name Sputnik Monroe,
>> described as "two hundred and thirty-five pounds of twisted steel and sex
>> appeal with the body men fear and women love."  According to Juan Williams
>> in _My Soul Looks Back_ (N.Y.: Sterling/AARP, 2004), p. 37,
>> Monroe sometimes added "rough, tough, and hard to bluff" (about 350 raw
>> Googlits) to this list of his rasslin' virtues.
>>
>> Just when Monroe adopted these phrases for his own is not clear. He began
>> wrestling in the '40s, but didn't fully retire until 1998.
>>
>> Rick Atkinson (_The Long Gray Line_, Houghton, 1989, p.114),  asserts
>> that West Point cadets were using the cliche' in 1965. No documentation,
>> but his book is based on extensive interviews. See it at Google Books.
>>
>> Sputnik liked to say, ""Win if you can, lose if you must, always cheat,
>> and if they take you out, leave tearing down the ring." Over to you, Fred.
>>
>> JL
>>
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>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>


-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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