- Last evening, my wife (Joyce) and I were talking about family sayings--and one she recalled from her mother was the expression smart cookie. We agreed that that seemed odd, a cookie's having no gray matter (unless it has food coloring--no fair!). So I checked it out. The Oxford English Dictionary has the earliest listing from 1939.
- b. Usu. with modifying adjective expressing some positive personal quality: a person. Esp. in smart cookie, tough cookie.1928 Chicago Tribune 7 Oct. (Comics) 2 What a swell bunch of cookies you turned out to be.1939 Oakland (Calif.) Tribune 4 June a9/1 We're a couple of smart cookies, hey?1942 Amer. Mercury Oct. 436/1 Just about the toughest cookie ever born.1953 W. R. Burnett Vanity Row xvi. 110 He's a real tough cookie and you know it.1981 W. Gleason Perils of Lulu ii. 40 You're one smart cookie. That deserves a kiss.
2009 Mirror (Nexis) 24 Mar.
3 [She] is a smart cookie and..won't
rush into making any rash decisions. - I've been reading the novels of Carl Hiaasen since I first stumbled across them, oh, a decade or more. Reading, though, is a bit too mild of a term. Swallowing whole? But this most recent one, Razor Girl (2016), I have been reading more slowly, enjoying immensely. Hiaasen, as many know, writes about the wackiness of south Florida, and this is another wacky example of the wackiness. Last night I laughed aloud at this opening of Chapter Twenty. (Nineteen ends as sex is commencing between one couple; Twenty begins with the conclusion of sex between another couple, and these two people we do not like,)
- "The sex had lasted a long time. / Forty-three minutes, according to Deb's Fitbit. Forty-three minutes and 167 calories" (229).
- The New York Times reports today that post-truth is the word-of-the-year from the Oxford dictionaries. (Link to story.)
- Overheard in the coffee shop this morning; climate change is a hoax; the Electoral College is the greatest invention since the wheel--or, maybe, the stone axe.
- Finally--I memorized poem/literary passage #190 last week, an Emily Dickinson poem that has some family history. Mom used the line route of evanescence in a booklet about poetry that she wrote for her high school students at James A. Garfield High School; Garrettsville, Ohio. So ... in Mom's honor ... a poem about a hummingbird ...
A Route of
Evanescence
BY EMILY
DICKINSON
A Route of
Evanescence,
With a
revolving Wheel –
A Resonance
of Emerald
A Rush of
Cochineal –
And every
Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts it’s
tumbled Head –
The Mail
from Tunis – probably,
An easy
Morning’s Ride –
No comments:
Post a Comment