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Cereal killer and didactic tools: the fictional character Solomon Grundy might also resemble Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s monster invoked the reanimation of tissue or the extension of life and represents the 19th Century utopian resurrection possible under modernism. In modern life, the personal battle is one of memory for conservatives, trying to reimagine a history that really wasn’t ever what happened as if any history does that. “History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it”. Do mnemonic devices also do that.
Alfred Hitchcock told it something like this: Two men were riding on a train in Scotland. One turned to the other and said, "What's in that black box on the luggage rack?". "A MacGuffin," the other replied. "What does it do?". "It catches lions on the Scottish highlands.".
Sometimes we simply need help remembering things; other times it’s about losing short-term memory. Darn word salads, how is it that we remember rhymes because of syntactic patterns. The nursery rhyme serves as a plot device in a Ben Affleck film The Accountant, as a means to calm a neurodivergent accountant/assassin.
Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
That was the end,
Of Solomon Grundy.
The lyrics were first recorded in 1842 by nursery rhyme and fairy-tale collector James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps. The song was translated in different languages including French, German or Italian. Being very easy to memorize, Solomon Grundy is used as a tool to teach kids the days of the week.
The song is telling the story of Solomon Grundy, a man who, metaphorically, lives and dies his entire life in one single week. Born on Monday, each day of the week he is growing older facing a different stage of his life, and his life ends on Saturday.
Solomon Grundy became a character of urban legends and comics. To scare children who are not wise, it is said that Solomon Grundy will return on Monday, in a similar way to a bogeyman.
There are many suggestions that Solomon Grundy phonetically derived from the food with the same name which is a pickled fish pâté, with salad and eggs.
The word for the English dish comes from the Salmagundi, an ingredient used in Solomon Grundy, originally a Jamaican mix of meat and salad, adapted into French Cuisine around the 17th century and then English cuisine around the 18th century.
allnurseryrhymes.com/...
Salad. "Salmagundi is more of a concept than a recipe. Essentially, it is a large composed salad that incorporates meat, seafood, cooked vegetables, raw vegetables, fruits, and nuts and is arranged in an elaborate way.
It makes me hungry,’ said my husband when I mentioned the word salmagundi. That is his reaction to many words. But he liked the sound of it.
I think in its sound, suggestive of something impossible to pin down, it resembles serendipity. The obscure French original of salmagundi, a dish of chopped up meat and whatnot, must have become known in English through Rabelais’s gluttonous epic. Thomas Urquhart’s translation of 1653 speaks of the ‘Lairdship of Salmigondin’. Various rationalising respellings emerged, such as Sallad-Magundy (1710). Salad, by origin something salty, was not limited to raw greenery. ‘Sallet,’ wrote Randle Holme, the herald painter, ‘is either Sweet Herbs, or Pickled Fruits, or Cucumbers, Samphire, Elder-Buds, Broom-Buds, &c. eaten with Roasted Meats.’
In Samuel Foote’s comedy The Patron (1764) one character mentions salmagundi in a different form: ‘By your account, I must be an absolute olio, a perfect salamongundy of charms.’ That or Solomon Gundy were names for the dish in the 18th century, though their near relative Solomon Grundy (born on a Monday) was not seen in print till James Orchard Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes (1842).
www.spectator.co.uk/…
Broken: Triumph the Insult Comic Dog got busted in DC for trespass at the Capitol while doing a remote segment for The Late Show with Steven Colbert.
From his last trip to DC: