Not sure why this suddenly hit me today…ah, but then, isn’t that the whole point of MPSIMS?
For some reason, I recalled the tagline for The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear - “If you see just one movie this summer…you really should get out more often!” Which may or may not have been before recalling some Sportscenter anchor saying a long time ago: “If the playoffs began today…a lot of hotel reservations would get screwed up.”
That’s when I remembered, some “law of the kitchen” or whatever: “Cleanliness is next to impossible.”
And then a couple “end-to-end” quotes. “If all the debutantes in New York got laid end to end, I wouldn’t be surprised.” and “If you laid every prostitute in New York end to end, it would cost you [some 7-figure number].”
Oh, mustn’t forget the add-ons. “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. That way when you judge him, you’re a mile away and you have his shoes.” “Don’t drink and drive. You might hit a bump and spill it.”
Any others? And just to state the obvious, if there isn’t a website for this sort of thing, there should be!
And here’s one that too many people don’t recognize as being a mash up of two old sayings: “It’s no skin off my back!” (No skin off my teeth/the shirt off my back.)
Eve having again apparently absented herself from these shores, I hasten to point out that this was originally Dorothy Parker’s: "If all the girls at Vassar were laid end-to-end… I wouldn’t be surprised.
I’m certain this was original with an early-20th-Century wit, but I can’t remember which one. W.C/ Fields? H.L. Mencken? Will Rogers? Groucho Marx?
“If you’re driving and you come to a fork in the road, for gosh sake pick it up; somebody could get a flat running over it!”
Which reminds me of the little-kids’ riddle that fits this: “If March winds bring April showers, and April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring?”
Even if it predates him, Jack Handey got some mileage out of that one, too. Treating Handey as a source for “fractured” things is playing loose with the idea of “fractured” as I see it. To wit:
Sic transit gloria mundi… Tuesday is usually worse.
Heinlein had a character in one of the juveniles that dropped cheery fractured maxims all through the book. I wonder how many young readers were turned on to the notion of fun with language by that gambit.