Roger from New Orleans, Louisiana, recalls that at odd moments in a conversation his father-in-law would toss in a puzzling non sequitur: I had one gunch, but the eggplant over there. That was probably a misunderstanding or misremembering of the catchphrase phrase I had one grunch, but the eggplant over there, popularized in the 1950s by MAD magazine. The catchphrase originated in a 1951 book called In One Head and Out the Other (Amazon) by humorist Roger Price, co-inventor of Mad Libs. In it, Price jokingly advocated what he called the Avoidism philosophy and featured a character named Clayton Slope who “had a clever trick of saying any conceivable sentence so that it sounded like ‘I had one grunch but the eggplant over there.’” This is part of a complete episode.
In English, you can express skepticism with the classic saying when pigs fly. In Tagalog, a similar sentiment is expressed with a phrase that translates “when the crow turns white, when the heron turns black,” and there’s a Hungarian phrase that...
Dax in Santa Cruz, California, wonders: Now that we’re into the 21st century, when will people stop saying that initial 20 when referring to a year such as 2028 the way we dropped the 19 in the term 1980s and just started referring to the ’80s? This...
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