Pluperfect vs. Blue Burning?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Somewhere in a YouTube clip (not this one) and surely in this one <try 2:20 and following > character Ty Ty (Robert Ryan) has a line something like, Why in the pluperfect hell did that dirt have to bust loose like that…?

As an impressionable youngster I thought I was hearing “blue burning hell” and it made no sense to me.

Anybody else have such a dilemma? :smiley:

I almost started this in Cafe Society but it’s the expression I’m mostly curious about.

Damn fun movie – if dated. So move the thread if you see fit. (Like you need me to say that!) :slight_smile:

BTW: This may have been my first awareness of Michael Landon (as an albino, no less).

2

I thought this topic may have been around before! Sure enough, Guess Who!

3

“What in the pluperfect past tense was that?”

4

This guy was on his first trip to Boston, where he’d heard that ‘broiled scrod’ was a local delicacy not to be missed. So he gets off the plane, jumps in a cab, and asks the cabbie, “Hey, you know where I can get scrod around here?”

The cabbie being a Harvard grad, he turned to the guy and said, “You know, I’ve been driving a hack for fifteen years here, and I’ve heard that question a thousand times, but that’s the first time anyone’s used the pluperfect subjunctive.”