A little quote

In the latest (3/11/13) New Yorker, in a brief review of A Good Day to Die Hard — will it never stop? — this:

The action is in Russia, as John McClane (Bruce Willis) decamps to Moscow in search of hs errant son Jack (Jai Courtney), who turns out to be working for the C.I.A. Father and child have never truly bonded, so this is a chance to rediscover their love and trust by engaging in traffic-mashing car chases and widespread homicide.

Crucial piece bold-faced. Nice rhythm, surprising word choices. Admirable.

 

Annals of phallicity: or are you just happy to see me?

Over on ADS-L, the quotation hounds have been considering

Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

which is widely attributed to a flirty Mae West — it *sounds* like the sort of thing she would have said — but without any actual source in some particular movie. There’s a huge family of variants here, constituting the verbal counterparts to the examples of visual phallicity I’ve so often posted about.

Explanations and understandings

Posted by Mike McKinley on Facebook this morning:

Ah, I recognized this as a variant of a quotation I have long admired. From Boswell’s Life of Johnson, courtesy of the Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page:

Johnson having argued for some time with a pertinacious gentleman; his opponent, who had talked in a very puzzling manner, happened to say, “I don’t understand you, Sir;” upon which Johnson observed, “Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.”