It's getting down to the wire. We all know what I mean by this but where did that saying come from? Gary Martin, a writer and researcher on the origins of phrases and the creator of the Phrase Finder website looked into this here.
He wrote:
‘Down to the wire’ is a commonly used expression these days, but whenever I hear it I think ‘what wire?’, so I thought I’d look into it.
The earliest examples that I can find of ‘down to the wire’ in print are from educative pieces about viniculture, in which gardeners are advised to tie their vines ‘down to the wire’. I’ve also heard it used to describe car tyres that were on their last legs and had the underlying canvas and wire thread showing. Those aren’t of course the source of the phrase, which it turns out has more to do with horses than horsepower.
People have bet on horse races for centuries and the outcome of these has always been of close interest to punters. Before the days of electronic measurement and photo finishes the method adopted in the 19th century to decide the winner of a close race was to string a wire across the track above the finishing line.
Let's take this horserace analogy further. Say you were forced to bet every cent you had, that you mortgaged your house, emptied the college fund meant for your children, and had to bet it all on one particular horse or another. If your horse loses you and your children would be homeless.
Let's say further that the odds on each horse winning were 50/50.
Let's also say that despite these odds you know that one horse has been given outlawed performance enhancing drugs.
Going beyond this I'll add that the bookies are involved in a mob that is betting heavily on the other horse.
Not only that, suspicious looking people were seen hanging around the racetrack stables.
How I feel....
I live in a continuing care retirement community where the residents are almost all very liberal have taken to wearing simple name badges imprinted with drawings showing what they are interested in like cats or books. I had a special one made to show how I am feeling. I will wear it until the election. If Kamala wins I may have a little ceremony and use my heat gun to melt it. If Trump wins I am afraid I will keep wearing it.
You probably recognize the figure. It's the man in the famous Edvard Munch paintings and prints "The Scream."
If Kamala wins I'll go back to wearing my badge with the background of Dali's famous painting The Persistence of Memory, often called the melting clocks painting.
The well-known surrealist piece introduced the image of the soft melting pocket watch.It epitomizes Dalí's theory of "softness" and "hardness", which was central to his thinking at the time. As Dawn Adès wrote, "The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order". This interpretation suggests that Dalí was incorporating an understanding of the world introduced by Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity. Asked by Ilya Prigogine whether this was the case, Dalí replied that the soft watches were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of a Camembert melting in the sun.
I had a Zoom discussion with a columnist for a well known progressive website last night for his upcoming podcast (I'll post a blog about that when it is available) and one of the things I talked with him about was what both of us will write about if Kamala wins. I suggested I might try science fiction short stories but noted that I find writing good fiction far more difficult than writing (hopefully) good essays. In a way this is like painting a good abstract or surreal picture as opposed to painting a realistic one which while taking talent I don't think takes that much creativity.
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