You break it, you bought it.
An article on the Fashion page on Tuesday about the British designer Alexander McQueen misstated a phrase from his remarks on the common professional desire to create a signature product. He said, “And you’ve just got to keep on striving until one day you’re waking up, having your marmalade on toast, doodling on a cigarette package—and bingo, Bob’s your uncle”—not “you bought an uncle.” (The slang expression means, roughly, “You’ve got it made.”)
—The New York Times correction page, via The Minor Fall, the Major Lift.
Oh, hell, while we’re on about uncles: Chris Bertram linked a wickedly funny piss-take on evolutionary psychology over at Crooked Timber.
[H]ere’s Pinker on why we like fiction: “Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?” Good question. Or what if it turns out that, having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world? It’s important to think out the options betimes, because a thing like that could happen to anyone and you can never have too much insurance.
(Of course, Pinker’s original example has a po-faced absurdity all its own: just ask these gentlemen.)
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