That’s a regional idiom.
Incorrectly so, as it turns out!
“Skid Row” is also just wrong.
What should it be?
I think this is easily resolved. Look, what’s that on the ground? Litter. Is that where it’s supposed to be? No, it’s supposed to be in a trash can. Well, gee, I wish someone had put it in its place…
Maybe that only really works in a bizarre hypothetical-future-looking-backwards tense of some sort, but it doesn’t at all bug me the way that say, “literally”-meaning-“metaphorically” does.
Maybe it’s the view with a really tiny moon? And Turkmenistan is an image of Subaru doing a sweet-ass jump in front of a crescent moon, except one of the stars on the emblem (Pleiades) broke off.
That doesn’t explain Tunisia and Algeria’s bizarre design. Ninja shuriken attack?
“Skid Road”. It was named for the road in Seattle that they slid the logs down to get them to the harbor.
Congratulations. It’s the first time in nearly sixty years that I’ve encountered it. Though I do see that “spitting” could well be a corruption of “spirit and.”
Thanks – very interesting ! So per one item in the link, “spit and image” is not just “random wordage” – it actually refers to something, i.e. God’s creating Adam in Genesis. Perhaps I’ve been unconsciously influenced by the British current-affairs-satire television show with grotesque puppets, “Spitting Image”.
I’d submit that “Skid Row” – even if inaccurate vis-a-vis the urban geography of Seattle – feels extremely right, as a byword for a place where the destitute and desperate hang out. As people remark, “sometimes sound trumps sense”.
It might have been an error at one time but it’s been the standard for over a hundred years.
In the original Poldark, when Geoffrey Charles sees Valentine after having been away at school for several years, he says what I always thought was “Why, he’s the spitting image of Uncle Ross!”
I’ll have to see if I can find this passage in one of the books (The Four Swans, I think), but I’m wondering if there’s also a video of the series out there somewhere.
Spitting image is a common version of the phrase…it’s just the most recent one, appearing early in the 20th century. So it doesn’t seem unlikely that he said it. (OTOH, it COULD also have been spit and image or spitten image.)
I had always thought the “spit” was meant to be physically descriptive of the father’s ejaculate. It took me years to realize it meant “spirit.”
It always felt to me like a combination of “Skid Road” and “Death Row.” Not just where the destitute hang out, but where their fortunes are extremely unlikely to get any better before they die.
And I believe that the term date back to the 17th century, before the foundation of the city of Seattle.
I’d guess that there was actually a fourth size smaller than the medium, the kid’s size.
McDonald’s currently sells fries in four sizes, kid’s, small, medium, and large.
I watched this movie many times as a kid, and your description of how Madison gets her name is correct.
Here’s one that always bugs me. In This Is Spinal Tap, after Nigel Tufnel quits and the band decides to perform a jazz fusion experiment, David St. Hubbins introduces themselves as “Spinal Tap, Mk II.” Except – it’s nowhere near the second lineup of the band, they’ve already had 30+ other members come and go (mostly drummers who died in bizarre circumstances) so they should be Mark XXVII or something like that.
Obviously the coming and going of drummers wasn’t considered to change the character of the band. That seems entirely realistic.
Does “please don’t rape my language” count as a “small thing” or not? How difficult is it to find someone who can explain to an actress who’s supposed to have been after a Javier for ten years that Javier is not pronounced gay beer (I don’t expect Spanish pronunciation, specially in the middle of an English-language sentence, but for María Moliner’s sake, just say Xavier!)? Is there a sudden shortage or Hispanic cleaners in Hollywood?