At my first English language college in Australia (approximately 10 years ago) the classes joined together for the last lesson on Fridays and watched a movie. There was meant to be some educational value but I was sometimes a bit worried about choices of the colleague who usually chose the movie.
One such movie was Bad Boys, starring Martin Lawrence and Will Smith. There is genuine linguistic point in the use of African American Vernacular English, but that probably would have been lost on the students. At one point the two police seek information from a reluctant informer. I always remembered him saying “I don’t know everything about everything, but I do know some things about some things”. I was going to use that as a tagline for this blog, but didn’t want to quote anything I wasn’t 100% sure of.
Recently, I thought to look at Wikiquote’s page for the movie, which records him as saying “I don’t know everything. I only know a little bit”. So there goes that one.
At one choir camp – if my fragment of a memory serves me correctly, in 1991 – we sang a choral piece which included the words “inextricably rooted”, which has an unfortunate double meaning for a speaker of Australian English, in which root can mean to engage in sexual intercourse (with) or damage or destroy, and rooted has related meanings. I thought “Surely that’s got to be somewhere on the internet”. Apparently not. There are occurrences of “inextricably rooted”, but seemingly none related to poetry or choral music. But the fact that the internet doesn’t record something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
So am I misremembering or not? It is a simple matter to find the first example – find the DVD in and shop, or the movie online, and skip to that point. To find the second example, I don’t have to search every piece of choral music – I’m sure that the poem was secular and that the composer was a 20th century American. If I am misremembering, then of course I will never find it, but I might find something very similar to it.
I mentioned “inextricably rooted” briefly in a major international linguistics forum, and no-one has said “Oh, that’s [this poem] by [that poet]”.
Never Pure and Rarely Simple 