2010 moments..

The Guys in the Woods

For Love..

"The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

405|250

If we are told we have Our Work Cut Out For Us we know there is a lot to be done and a difficult task lies ahead. The phrase stems from the craft of tailoring but at first glance it would seem the work is being made easier (by having someone cut out patterns before the stitching begins). But, in fact, such a practice makes life more difficult for the tailor, as cutting the work out in advance is much quicker than actually tailoring a suit and therefore piles of material would mount up making it hard for the tailor to keep up. Therefore it is quite easy to imagine a tailor explaining he is busy as he has his "work cut out for him" and would be hard at it for the foreseeable future. The first recorded appearance of the phrase meaning "more than one can handle" turned up in A Christmas Carol, a Charles Dickens novel first published in 1843.

- Albert Jack, Red Herrings and White Elephants: The Origins of the Phrases We Use Every Day.