I’m driving down the road minding my own bidness, listening to the iPod on shuffle mode (the tune at the time was Elton’s Border Song) and I read this message on the rear window of the vehicle in front of me:
Putting aside the curious custom of advertising your loved one’s passing on an SUV, I cannot parse that last sentence. Any thoughts?
mmm
I would read it as “Only God (not the devil or anyone else) takes the good ones.”
I would read it as “God only takes the good ones” and the person wasn’t careful getting it printed. There are only a handful of results for this phrase on google - and the ones I checked indicated poor understanding of English. In the context I read the couple I did - they were clearly sad for their lost one - and weren’t making some weird statement about god.
You missed the front bumper sticker, “Baal is substantially less choosy.”
Satan kills people who deserve to die but God’s just being a dick.
Well done.
In my neck of the woods - er, desert, it’s common to have memorial decals on the back window of a car or truck. A lot of people wear memorial t-shirts, too.
I agree it was supposed to be “God only takes the good ones” and someone got it confused. Kind of like the phrase “only the good die young”. I see a lot of memorial stickers on vehicles here too, and find them a little morbid/odd/tacky.
NM also has those big highway signs with drunk driver deaths memorialized on them. It took a while before I figured out the people on the signs were victims and not the drunk drivers. :smack:
To nitpick, “God only takes the good ones” is more ambiguous than “Only God takes the good ones,” assuming that the bumper sticker’s meaning is indeed that the good ones are taken only by God, as Red Stilettos interpreted above.
To say that “God only takes the good ones” seems to convey that God does only one thing with the good ones: He takes them, as opposed to, say, letting them live a much longer life before “receiving” them for instance. “God only takes” has a sort of snatchy, grabby quality about it.
There’s a similar difference in connotation between “Only the good die young” and “The good only die young.” The former implies that bad people never die young, and the latter implies that good people always do so.
Perhaps for a bumper sticker, a more precise phrase would be “God takes only the good ones” because God may be killing time doing other stuff besides taking people, but when he feels like taking someone, he takes only a good one.
In any case, “Only God takes the good ones” is so corny and meaningless that I would feel silly uttering such a phrase, even sillier pasting it to my bumper, because John Smith could very well be burning in the fiery depths of Hell right now. Either that, or he could have apparently lived forever by being a slimy, evil son of a bitch.
To clarify, it was not a bumper sticker, but white lettering that covered a good part of the rear window real estate. It looked professionally - or at least very carefully - done.
My first interpretation was that everyone who has ever died is good; that is, they were ‘taken’. But that would mean that the rest of us who still have a pulse are not so good. Not yet, anyway.
I did pull up alongside the vehicle to eyeball the driver. She was a middle-aged heavy-set Caucasian who was puffing on a cigarette.
mmm
Visit a cemetery that has Russians buried in it. They have the most elaborate tombstones I’ve ever seen, complete with a picture of the person lased into the stone. They must spend a fortune on these things.
Perhaps it should say “God takes SUV drivers. I’m next.”
It means that someone who is dumb enough to think you give a shit about their dead relative is also dumb enough to think that sentence means what they think it means.
I would take it to mean what it says: God is the only one who takes the good ones. The devil takes the rest. I do not see it as bad grammar. “God only takes (or takes only) the good ones” is an idiotic sentiment and really cannot be what is meant.
They’re very common in St Martin and other Caribbean islands. That and religious proclamations, like “THE LORD WATCHES OVER ME” across the top of the windshield.
ETA: I’ve got a picture of an old hatchback with fancy italic lettering across the hatch, “FUCK HATERS”.
There is a “God only takes the best” poem and other sentiments on google - originally I only saw 20 or so results, but now I see 111,000 in Google for “only God” while almost five times as many for the other way around. This isn’t really proof - but just saying I don’t think it’s idiotic - and if you look at the examples of where people are using it – when used as “Only God” - the examples I saw were people that were using it cause they were clearly morning the loss of their loved one.
To me - “God only” is saying something nice about the person who died - while “Only God” is praising God. None of the examples I read were praising God in any special way.
I agree it is an idiotic sentiment - but I really think that it what they mean. They have a loved one, the loved one died, the loved one is therefore a “good one” cause God took them. Not very logical and missing a step, but no more or less idiotic then whenever there is some tragedy - if someone dies - someone will go on the news and say “well God took him/called him home” and if they live “well God saved him”.
I saw one of these the other day; based on the dates, it appeared to be for a young girl who died shortly before her 10th birthday. (I’ve never quite understood the need for someone to broadcast their loss via a car sticker, but I am not in their head, so whatever.)
However, in this case, the car also had a vanity plate reading 4EVER9. I thought that was a bit extreme.
I see a lot of these car window “In Memory Of” messages here in Alabama. I find it completely morbid. Why do you want to drive around with that on your car every day?