Dear Cecil,
You’re letting Ed write the punchlines again, aren’t you?
One common feature of this trope is that the piano, or safe, or what have you, is being hoisted up the outside of a building with a block and tackle presumably because it’s too big or too heavy to go up the stairs or the elevator. My guess would be that this cliche’ harkens back to the latter nineteenth century, when buildings started becoming very tall but stairwells were still narrow and elevators more like those lightweight cagelike contraptions you see in old movies. This would have become an obsolete practice once freight elevators became standard in most multistory buildings.
BTW: has anyone ever been crushed under a road roller (“steam roller”)?
(I can picture a murder mystery called “The Cartoon Murders” about a series of macabre deaths by cliche’d methods).
Someone miss a chance for a pun?
On flying anvils: “… but you can see where things could go tragically awry”
works also as “… but you can see where things could go tragectorally awry” - although I can’t find anything proving that “tragectorally” is an accepted word.
Reminds me of the classic torts case used to illustrate res ipsa loquitur, in which someone got beaned by a barrel of flour that came suddenly rolling out of the second story of a building. (Another favorite res ipsa case: the one where someone found, IIRC, a partially decomposed, severed human toe in their pouch of chewin’ tobacky…)
You’re probably thinking of “trajectory”
Soda vending machines now carry a warning that tipping them can crush you to death. Presumably these came about in response to some actual crushings.
Thank you for the introduction to that delightful pastime of anvil launching.
I’m pretty sure he was unironically surnamed, probably generations before the incident. That will be of little comfort to the widow Keys and the little Keys.
There are people who believe that the English word “irony” refers only to a rhetorical device, and not to situations. They are nurturing a fantasy.
I agree with you that his surname had some irony in view of his demise. However, he was not named ironically.
Hah!
Harks back to my very first Teemings article, Watch out for Falling Anvils:
http://www.teemings.net/series_1/issue01/anvils.html
I don’t know of any cases of anvil-firing deaths (or any falling-anvil deaths, for that matter), but it wouldn’t surprise me if there hadn’t been injuries from anvil firings. Lord knows that the 19th (and early 20th) century penchant for blowing things up for entertainment certainly did result in some fatalities.
Things like this:
Being crushed by an anvil, however, is always an ironic situation, regardless of name.
Properly plummeting perilous pianos need a pair of experts.
My reading of history/law leads me to believe that death by mill wheel was relatively common. Leading to the mill wheel being treated as a killer. Strict liability was a feature of early English law, even when dealing with inanimate objects.
I dunno the actual cause of death. Probably loading/unloading was more of a hazard than falls from a height.
Blech. Cartoons were created ex-nova? No mention of film or vaudeville precedents?
You know of any?
You mean minor keys.
Serves me right for not being musical.
You’re confusing the past participle in its guise as a “verbal adjective” – i.e., just describing something’s state of being – with its variant guise as a “statement of an event having taken place” – i.e., reference to a specific action.
The difference is the basis for the old joke: “She was turned on by the television, and vice-versa.”
Just to clarify an error in Cecil’s column and Slug’s illustration, the cavity that is filled with powder is on the bottom of the anvil, not the top (known as the face). Bealers’s “The Art of Blacksmithing” has a good illustration.
IIRC, there was a beef between an ABANA (the Artist Blacksmith Association of North America) and a regional chapter over the inclusion of anvil shooting at official events. Anvil shooting has always seemed to me to be a way to ruin a perfectly good anvil.
Rob