I’ve tried to come up with a clever title to this notion, and settled on this one out of laziness.
The main idea is along these lines: imagine you’re listening to a song, a poem, some line of dialog, or some other excerpt from an item of pop culture, and it gets stated that “they say…” or “wise men say…” or “leading research figures show…” or something of that sort. You immediately (or after a little thought) determine that this particular fact or prevalent opinion is just hokum. So rather than going along with the hypothesis being presented, you just yell “Cite!” or something as effective in showing your disbelief.
Some examples I thought of before deciding to get your help:
“Wise men say only fools rush in…” (Bullshit!)
“They say that falling in love is wonderful…” (Nonsense!)
“It has been written that…” (Cite!)
“When I was just a little boy, my mama said to me…” (Right!)
Share some that have struck you as probably just made up by the poet, songwriter, or “authority” in question.
Horseshit, ma’am. Turning my nose back the way it’s supposed to be facing will make the verbal equivalents of violent space monkies fly out of my mouth.
Thanks for the reply! I began to think I had found yet another dead-end topic. I’m not convinced the topic is all that hot even yet.
How about this sort of thing: “Hello,” he lied. (generally attributed to a lawyer)
Actually, what got me going with the OP idea was a song that had some really lame lyrics, along the lines I mentioned above. Attributing some nonsense to “they” as if that lent weight to writer’s idea.
Of course, if I explain it much more it will lose whatever punch it might have had. And I detect that at least 90 Dopers didn’t find it all that whelming to begin with. Pretty self-referential, I’d say.
I love the cliché from 50’s TV where they would spout wisdom starting with “A wise man once said …”
That was obviously the same thing as 30’s movies when Charlie Chan would begin “Confucius say…” but they probably assumed that most of middle America had never heard of Confucius.
Exactly what I was trying to verbalize. Thanks for saying it so it makes sense.
Tin Pan Alley songs are replete with that sort of drivel, and I would suspect things haven’t really gotten all that much more direct and frank with more recent songwriting if you look a little nbelow the surface. Maybe not as obviously hokey as they old “they say…” stuff, but since I rarely listen to lyrics anyway, I guess I was hoping others might light up to the topic.
Although I can’t quote any off the top of my head, I know that old blues songs (and maybe newer ones I haven’t heard yet) seem to use this gimmick a lot. Some everyday piece of information, or maybe even an outright lie, gets attributed to a witch doctor, a voodoo woman, the preacher man, or even the Good Lord, as an excuse to do something heinous or to violate some law of Nature.
It will be great if some of you can cite some of this hyperbole from more respected or “classical” sources. Oh yeah, the Bible more than likely has a few, too!
It just occurred to me: what if instead of standing ovations and rounds of applause, the attendees at the SOTU just were to holler “Bullshit!” at appropriate points in the speech? Would that be a racket or what?
