According to most sources, the name “Quarrymen” came from Quarry Bank High School attended by John. I always thought this odd, since he appears to have been an indifferent pupil and not at all the sort who would name his band after the dear old school.
You’d be surprised sometimes what attachments there can be. I was an underachieving B+ student in high school, but I once had plans to name a child after the place.
32 years of life behind me, and what great epiphany do I have recently?
It’s sherBET… not sherBERT.
:smack:
I feel really silly posting this, especially because orange sherbet is my favorite.
The whole “sherbert” thing annoys me to an irrational level (and has since I was a kid) and I don’t know why. I have told several people that it’s “sherbet” not “sherbert”… you’d be surprised at how many people will argue with me and tell me I’m wrong.
I have no idea why this particular mispronunciation stands out for me as one of those things that makes my skin itch, but it does.
Seriously? Come to the great midwest. Even before texting became a way of life, I saw “AUCE” much more often then “AYCE.”
Strange.
Huh. That honestly never occurred to me.
I was reading about property law the other day and I came across the word “alienation.” Stared at it for a few seconds, thinking, “Hey, if there were two 'n’s, you could divide it into the words ‘alien’ and ‘nation.’ Hey… that sounds familiar…”
So yeah. As it turns out, the '80s-'90s TV/movie culture phenomenon was named for a play on words. Never realized.
I had this moment, in the eighties, working in a record store, when the Bangles were popular. I mused to myself how heavily influenced by the Beatles they were, and suddenly it all fell into place: Beatles==>beat<==>bang<==Bangles
heh, I say “sherbert”, sorry Opal. Where does “sorbet” come in and how the hell do you pronounce that?
My “ah ha” moment was the word “beau coup”. I had said the phrase “beau coup bucks” forever but never considered how it was spelled. When I first saw it in writing, I had a :smack: moment.
sorbet = “sorbay”
It’s French.
regarding the whole sherbert thing… I’m going to pretend I didn’t read that. It just gets too expensive hiring the hit men and all that.
In “The Wizard of Oz” I alway thought the wicked witch was saying “coffee will make them sleep”. One day I asked my brother, “I thought coffee keeps you awake”. Hilarity insued.
Funny the Beatles would come up. I’m 50 and Abbey Road was the second album I owned, and so like many of us did with our first ten or so albums, I memorized every detail about that record - every sound, every picture, every credit.
Fast forward to three weeks ago. I had just returned from a vacation in Vegas where the highlight was a performance of the Beatles “LOVE” show. Back home in my comfy chair and with laptop I Wiki’d the “LOVE” show for any trivia I’d missed and the next thing I know it’s six hours later and I’ve read everything ‘Beatles’ on Wiki and had already moved on to a fan site that listed every single “Paul Is Dead” clue real and imagined. The article eventually directs me to the famous “28IF” VW Beetle license plate, a famous clue I had been well aware of for the last 38 years, when for the very first time it occurs to me that the 28IF plate was on a VW BEETLE! A Beetle on a Beatles album. Sheeesh.
I always liked the story John told the Liverpudlian magazine, Mercy Beat. “A man came to me on a flaming pie and said ‘You are Beatles with an A.’ And we are.”
But the story you mention isn’t technically apocryphal. John said in one interview that he chose the name Beatles because he really liked the pun in Crickets, and only later realized that Buddy Holly’s band wouldn’t have been aware of the pun. Though I always wondered how that account fit into earlier forms of the band’s name. “The Silver Beetles” and “Long John and the Silver Beetles” (Paul: Don’t let anybody tell you John never changed his name. For that tour he was Long John and happy to be it!")
Which reminds me…it was a long time before I made the connection between the stage name Paul McCartney used on that tour–Paul Ramon–and the band The Ramones.
One more for the pile of people who didn’t “get” the Beatles double-entendre-pun-whatjamajig until about a year ago. I’m 33.
It took me a couple of years to figure out what Mrs. Choksondik’s last name meant (on South Park).
I didn’t learn that the ginger in ginger ale was because the drink was supposed to taste like ginger until college. That was the first time I had ginger beer, which actually does taste like ginger, and I went Ohhhh.
When I was a kid, I asked why they were called soft drinks, and was told it was because they weren’t “hard,” like alcohol. Since ginger ale tastes nothing like ginger (not that I would have been able to tell at the time either way), I assumed that it was ginger as in soft, like gingerly. Hence, “soft” (weak) ale. A bit silly, but I still maintain that fake banana and watermelon have closer resemblance to their native fruits than ginger ale does to any kind of ginger taste.
YES!! I feel exactly the same way!
My sister corrected our cousin over this once, and he actually told her that “it’s SPELLED s-h-e-r-b-e-t, but it’s PRONOUNCED ‘sherbert’.” Doofus.
Anyone remember a game called Gnip Gnop?
It’s Ping Pong spelled backwards. Or Pong Ping, strictly.
Except that they were originally called the Supersonic Bangs. Beatles were still a big influence, though. They even had a corresponding lineup. Smart one, cute one, quiet one, drummer.
The Beatles could also be considered a tribute to the “Beat” generation, which author Jack Kerouac claimed he named as a shortening of “beatitude.”
It was a while before I realized Bart Simpson’s teacher “Mrs. Kra-bapple” was actually a play on “crab apple.”
??
I don’t watch South Park, and it’s not obvious to me what it means.