When in shock, people resort to their training. In those days, there was enormous stress on trains being on time. They didn’t have the mechanisms we do to communicate schedule changes, and - obvs - bad things happened when trains came through unexpectedly. The safest thing (and the automatic thing) to do was get everything back to schedule as quickly as possible.
That’s from one of Tex Avery’s MGM cartoons, and shows his characteristic sense of humor.
They referred to it obliquely in Who Framed Roger Rabbit in the opening cartoon segment, where the brand of the oven is “Hotternell”.
That is not completely wrong, but the proper translation of “there is nothing worse” into Spanish would actually be “no hay nada peor”. Double negative, but that is the right Spanish expression. My excuses, I was not concentrated this morning.
Thanks for the explanations!
Are you accounting for the likelihood that place names tend to be somewhat poetic, or otherwise use different syntax than idiomatic speech? It seems you are, but I just want to poke at it. 
Oh, there is nothing more poetic and romantic than saying “Better than nothing!” at the right moment, believe me, I always took this into account and it has always worked for me.
TIL: there’s a song called “Harrigan (That’s Me)” which is obviously the basis for the song “Gilligan (that’s me)” in the S2E3 “The Little Dictator”.
And Allan Sherman’s “Horowitz” - an ode to concert pianist Vladimir Horowitz:
“H-O-ROW-ITZ spells Horowitz.
Yesterday I took my girlfriend Peggy
To watch him play a concert at Carnegie.
V-L-ADIMI-R, that’s Vladimir.
And he plays piano good,
Like a real piano player should.
Horowitz. Hear, hear!”
There was an old TV show about lawyers (IIRC) named Hannigan, and they used that song as their theme, just substituting Hannigan for Harrigan. It was originally written by George M. Cohan in 1908.
It was Harrigan and Son
Thanks. My memory was wrong. I was only eight when it was on and about all I remember was the theme song…and even that was incorrect!
As everyone knows, a crust of bread is better than a 5-star gourmet dinner. Because a crust of bread is better than nothing, and nothing is better than a 5-star gourmet dinner.
Same here. I was 10 and could only remember “H-A-double R-I- something something something spells Harri-something…”
It was also used, not surprisingly, as the opening theme for the virtually forgotten TV show Harrigan and Son , which starred Pat O’Brien (1960).
RealityChuck beat you by 15 hours.
Well, and carps. But I went straight from the quoted entry.
And I linked to the bYouTube of the song.
During the Civil War, Jefferson Davis sent his two sons (William and Jefferson jr) to Bishop’s College School in Lennoxville (Sherbrooke), Quebec (Canada). For a time - he lived on the campus with his wife. “Junior” later died at the age of 21 of yellow fever. The school is still going strong.
President Franklin Pierce’s mother was named Anna Kendrick.
(sometimes these facts are more random, less interesting)
Did anyone accuse them of dodging the draft?
I don’t know about that. From my search, she’s apparently the subject of one of the earliest color photographs. (Google doesn’t lie!)
