“Think outside the box.”
“When come, bring pie.”
“I for one welcome our alien overlords.”
This is from the Simpsons. Uttered by Kent Brockman when Kang and Kodos had become rulers of earth
“When come back, bring pie.”
Two have been answered; as long as this remains in Cafe Society and not General Questions, I feel free to talk out my butt about the last one.
There’s a simple, confounding puzzle: arrange nine dots in three rows of three, one on top of the other, to form a square, like so:
…
…
…
Now draw four straight lines such that each dot is intersected by at least one line.
Try this for a bit before reading the postscript to this post.
Daniel
P.S. The solution is one folk etymology I’ve heard for the saying.
Not quite; uttered by Kent Brockman went he though giant alien ants were about to become rulers of the earth.
“Think outside the box” comes from corporate feel-good-training-sessions-speak.
Okay, two addenda:
- If I bothered to google before posting, I’d find out that the Internet agrees with my butt: this puzzle is the source of the expression.
- I left out a crucial component of the puzzle: you’re not allowed to lift your pen off the page when drawing the four lines. Otherwise, it’s stupidly easy.
Daniel
…itself drawing on the explanation given by Left hand of dorkness. However, I find it hard to believe that this is itself the origin - the ‘moral’ of the exercise seems to rely on a pre-existing knowledge of the phrase.
And it’s not “alien overlords”, it’s “insect overlords”.
I know I’ve been in management consulting training sessions where the phrase was used, without the puzzle. It was a metaphorical box; think without being constrained by your self-imposed boundaries. So I think the word origins cite is bogus.
My mother used puzzles like that when I was a wee lass (in the early '80s) to make me examine ALL possibilities. I didn’t hear that god-awful phrase until much much later but my mother’s lessons, and the point of the puzzles basically boil down to the same thing.