Thursday, January 19, 2006

They Might Be Giants


Word of the day: Quixotic

adj. Absurdly chivalric, like Don Quixote. An insight into the beauty and excellence of this incomparable adjective is unhappily denied to him who has the misfortune to know that the gentleman's name is pronounced Ke-ho-tay.
richardgingras.com/devilsdictionary/q.html

caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals; idealistic without regard to practicality; capricious; impulsive.
users.wpi.edu/~kgagne/vocab/vocab14ab.html

not sensible about practical matters; unrealistic; "as quixotic as a restoration of medieval knighthood"; "a romantic disregard for money"; "a wild-eyed dream of a world state"
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Don Quixote de la Mancha () is a novel by the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. It is one of the earliest novels in a modern European language and many people consider it the finest book in the Spanish language.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quixotic

~~~

Where does the name "They Might Be Giants" come from?

They Might Be Giants is the name of a film starring George C. Scott, as a classic paranoiac who thinks he's Sherlock Holmes, and Joanne Woodward, as his psychiatrist Dr. Watson.

Fred Wolf adds:

[The] film you cite was previously a broadway play. The play's title . . . comes from a section of Don Quixote da la Mancha by Miguel Cervantes, where Don Quixote's trusted servant Sanch Panza asks the Don why is preparing to attack several windmills (common in Spain) with his lance. Don Quixote replies "Why, because they might be giants."
Russ Josephson writes:
For me, the key dialogue of the movie, where the title comes from, follows:

Holmes: Here, what do you make of it?

Watson: God, you're just like Don Quixote, you think everything's always something else.

Holmes: Heh, heh, heh, well he had a point. Of course, he carried it a bit too far. He thought that every windmill was a giant. That's insane. But, thinking that they might be ... Well, all the best minds used to think the world was flat. But, what if it isn't? It might be round. And bread mold might be medicine. If we never looked at things and thought of what they might be, why, we'd all still be out there in the tall grass with the apes.

John Linnell explains: "It's the name of a movie made in the early seventies. We wanted a name that was outward-looking and paranoid."

(this posting if for you pj)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's a really good quote. You better use it in a story somehow, because I would--but I won't, since it's yours :)