Pounding on the cable...

[alexpgp]

There are a number of curious turns of the phrase that have eluded my efforts to track them down on the internet.

Among these is a line from Ogden Nash, in a paean to baseball titled Line-Up For Yesterday. The poem consists of 26 short stanzas, all but the last of which are devoted to famous players, in alphabetical order. Nash wrote the following for the letter "O":

"O" is for Ott
Of the restless right foot.
When he leaned on the pellet,
The pellet stayed put.

I understand the "restless right foot" part. But when one "leans on the pellet" in baseball, what, exactly, is one doing?

Another mystery is "egg in one's beer," which I recall first reading in some piece of fiction about the Marines ('Whaddaya want—an egg in your beer?'). This slang appears to have no clear etymology, but from the context of its usage, it appears to mean something along the lines of "you want something extra for nothing?"

And finally, there is the quote from which the subject of this post is derived.

A year before I graduated from Stony Brook, Robert A. Heinlein delivered a talk to the Brigade of Midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy. It's actually a great lecture, if only because of Heinlein's "Five Rules for Success in Writing" (which, I suspect is applicable in other endeavors), but a number of sources on the 'net cut out all the stuff about writing and focus only on the part after Heinlein asked a plebe "Mister, why are you here?."

In addressing that rhetorical question, Heinlein wonders why anyone would want to become a naval officer. It's not the pay. What about...

Working conditions? You'll spend half your life away from your family. Your working hours? 'Six days shalt thou work and do all thou art able; the seventh the same, and pound on the cable.' A forty-hour week is standard for civilians - but not for naval officers. You'll work that forty-hour week, but that's just a starter.

I've never been able to determine the meaning of "pounding on the cable."

But it does create a certain mental picture.

At any rate, I had intended to translate 3,000 source words today. I managed almost 30% more than that, which puts me in reasonably good shape, but I'm not out of the woods yet.

The evening was spent with everyone running around packing. The kids go back to Oilers-land tomorrow.

And unless I miss my guess, tonight is the "fall back" night, time-wise.

This should be fun.

Cheers...

Comments

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Not sure what "egg in one's beer" means as an expression, but I will tell you that a lot of longtime alcoholics requested it at the bar they'd been drinking at all night. At least, at one time. It was kind of a staple of '40s detective fiction.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

The expression appears to have been widespread in the '40s (if I had to go out on a limb, the story that introduced the expression to me was Leon Uris's Battle Cry, about WW II in the Pacific).

With nothing else to go on, I had narrowed my suspicions about what having "egg in your beer" really means to either (a) an efficient way of eating breakfast while still consuming alcohol, or (b) a hangover countermeasure of some kind.

Your comment, along with my guess that people who are drinking (either for fun or because they are driven to do so) really don't care, one way or another, about breakfast being "the most important meal of the day," leads me to think that (b) is the clear frontrunner of my two suspicions.

(The idea that "egg in one's beer" may actually taste good was dispelled by me and some college friends, back in the day, during a wholly unscientific survey on the subject undertaken one weekend night. And while the combination is not anywhere near as disgusting a concoction as it may sound, it also lacks anything in particular, taste-wise, to recommend it.)

Cheers...