A Snowball in Hell…What Chance has it Got?

30 Jan 2009 14 Comments

by madsilence in Humor, Life, Thoughts Tags: idiom, simile

My father-in-law, a product of the Great Depression and World War II, was a past master of the idiom, profane and humorous, esoteric and insightful.  Unfortunately he died before I could capture his many creative expressions.   One of his oft-used idioms:  “since Hector was a pup.”  I never understood its meaning, except that it seemed to refer to times long ago.  WorldWideWords.org provides a detailed definition:

“Since Hector was a pup” was in fashion at about the time that Hector really was just a pup. It began to appear in North American newspapers around 1906 and almost immediately became a catchphrase that later spread around the English-speaking world. There’s quite a variety of ideas behind it. “Hector” seems to have been a fairly common name for dogs at the time. This was borrowed from the name of the hero of the Trojan War, the son of Priam and Hecuba, who became a symbol of the consummate warrior. By the early twentieth century, “pup” was also well established as a mildly dismissive name for a young person, particularly an inexperienced beginner. So Hector was a pup a very long time ago indeed. Another expression of the period using his name was “as dead as Hector”, known from the 1860s. Those versed in Greek mythology (there were more then than there are now) would have remembered that in later life Hecuba was turned into a dog for killing Polyxena, the murderer of her son Polydorus, so you might consider Hector to have been a literal pup, perhaps even the original son of a bitch.

A Snowball in Hell...What Chance has it Got? Creator: Udo J. Keppler, American artist, 1872-1956. Created/Published: 12/24/12

There’s a definite artistry to idioms, those “fixed distinctive expressions with nonliteral meanings, whose meanings cannot be deduced from the combined meanings of the actual word.”  Take another popular expression: “a snowball’s chance in hell.”  Now it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what chance a snowball has in hell’s furnace-like atmosphere: none at all.

Idioms, phrases, and other expressions use words as paintbrush and palette, chisel and stone, to create image & meaning in the viewer’s mind.  Editorial cartoonist Udo Keppler offers a fair approximation of what a snowball might experience in the nether regions.

“When Hell freezes over” is another devilish phrase that deals with the probability of an event’s occurrence:  no chance whatsoever. Wikipedia offers a “List of idioms of improbability” that include the famous expression “when pigs fly” or, as is said in the German:

“Wenn Schweine Flügel hätten, wäre alles möglich” (if pigs had wings, everything would be possible)

Try saying that with all the umlauts in the right places!  Unmöglich! (Impossible!)

British author Charles Dickens was a master of the simile, a “figure of speech in which two fundamentally unlike things are explicitly compared, usually in a phrase introduced by ‘like”" or ‘as.’ ”   Take the popular simile, as dead as a doornail, meaning “absolutely dead; devoid of life; finished with; unusable”.  How comes the lowly doornail to to be compared with death eternal?  Dickens, writing in A Christmas Carol, attempts to improve upon the simile:

Old Marley was as dead as a door–nail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door–nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin–nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door–nail.

Marley was indeed dead at the beginning of the Dickens’ Christmas story:  “Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.“  What a great opening line!  And we know that Marley’s generous spirit was mirrored in that of his partner, Ebeneezer Scrooge:

“He was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel has ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”

What could be more solitary than an oyster?  Living alone within its shell, separated from its fellows, its treasure the pearl hidden away from grasping eyes.

A proverb is a “short pithy saying in frequent and widespread use that expresses a basic truth or practical precept.“  One of my father-in-law’s favorites was the saying,  “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.“  A reminder that it’s not over ’till it’s over, and only the final results count.

Do you have a favorite idiom, simile, phrase or expression?  Share it with us!

~MadSilence

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