Wednesday, 01/23/02

A few weeks ago, staring at a flag-bedecked car and thinking about grass-roots sloganeering, a phrase popped into my head:

United we stand
The harder we fall

It exerted some weird linguistic influence on me, especially when said out loud. I wanted to put it on a bumper sticker with a rippling American flag, and possibly an eagle, and see how long it took some proud patriot in a parking lot to bash in my window.

Last night, after half an hour of watching the freeway roll by, I figured out that the couplet evokes two different phrases with the same syllabic structure:

The bigger they are
the harder they fall

United we stand
divided we fall

At the time, I was only thinking about the first one, but most of the snarky meaning of my slogan turns out to stem from the second. 12:17PM «

Bits pushed by Movable Type