"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C Clarke
Musings from the technological frontier
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C Clarke
Musings from the technological frontier
2 comments:
This is well off topic, but interesting to us word smiths ;-)
The original saying is 'A hard row to hoe' in reference to farming.
It was a political commentator from New York who is given credit for coining the phrase 'A hard road to hoe', which he used to describe Zachary Taylor's bid for the Presidency. This mixed the metaphor of the road to the white house with Taylor's secondary vocation, farming. I can't find the commentators name, but he was expecting the current Vice President of the time (Van Buren from New York) to win and was poking fun at the 'farmer' president whom had never held any public office. Taylor was quite sympathetic to the south but was for keeping the union together. He was from Kentucky, and his son in-law was Jefferson Davis.
Taylor won becoming the 12th president, but died just a year later. Within 10 years, the south succeeded.
Follow up:
A 'rebuttal' political cartoon from the time with the caption 'A hard road to hoe' using the mixed metaphor against Van Buren:
http://www.picturehistory.com/product/id/11917
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