The Reader Travels

I love to look up phrases we use in our everyday language to figure out where they started. A lot of our idioms come from literature and story-telling traditions. There’s the popular phrase, “Catch 22,” that came from the book of the same name. And I always thought, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” came from The Iliad, where the Trojans send in the big horse filled with soldiers, but Dictionary.com says otherwise. Oh well.

Anyway, the term, “Big Brother,” came from George Orwell’s 1984, and in today’s time of conspiracy theories, the US Patriot Act and whatnot, it’s a very popular sentiment to think that Big Brother is indeed watching. In Orwell’s future London, the government is all seeing and all knowing. There’s nowhere to hide from Big Brother.

There’s this scene in the book where an auditorium full of people are chanting, “BB, BB, BB.” And this is the image that floated through my brain as I watched B.B. King in concert, circa 1992. Near the end of the concert, B.B. jammed on his guitar for twenty minutes, while his friend on stage punctuated the guitar solo with chants of the master’s name, ” B-b-b-Bee – BB. B-b-b-Bee – BB.”

Totally surreal, man.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 11:10 am and is filed under UK and Ireland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.