It's gonna be a late one.
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1. Tonight before bed, Sally was telling Francis that Notre Dame will play its first game tomorrow. “Will we get to watch it?” Francis asked. “Sure,” Sally said, “we’ll watch it on TV.” “No,” Francis complained, “I want to watch it at the football court.”
2. Late last night, around midnight, Francis got up to use the bathroom. I checked on her, and happened to be eating a grape popsicle. Half asleep, Francis asked “Daddy, why do you have a hot dog?”
      It seems that I’ve noticed people using this phrase more often lately but I’ve never quite known what it meant. I’d always interpreted it to mean that an argument or position is needlessly complex and that faults lie in the details. Like a Rube Goldberg contraption that almost worked. The Cambridge Dictionary of Idioms suggests a very different meaning: that to be too clever by half is “to be too confident of your own intelligence in a way that annoys other people.” But other sources propose different meanings.
This message board of etymology geeks suggests that the idiom means “too smart for one’s own good,” or that someone has “outsmarted himself” — both of which are compatible with my previous understanding. A different site suggests that “by half” suggests simply, “by a long way.”
I suspect that the negative connotation conveyed by this old saying has something to do with a negative meaning of the word “clever”: “Superficially skillful, witty, or original in character or construction.” If cleverness is only superficial, it’s easy to understand why too much of it is a bad thing. But the specific prejudice against (1.5) x (cleverness) is a mystery to me unless we embrace the “by a long way” meaning for “by half.”
These are the kinds of things I think about at 12:30 am while I’m trying to avoid thinking about trying to sell my house.
Today after a visit to the aquarium, Francis turned to us and said, “do you know what I’m going to do when I grow up?” “No Francis, what are you going to do?” “When I grow up, I’m going to do flips on the balance beam and take care of animals.” I think those are worthwhile goals. |
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by Sally
trace - hey guldes
y'all driving or flying down?
if the drive brings you through Kansas call me…or catch a game…love you guys…be safe