Here’s a bit of English idiom trivia I came across recently. The phrase “life’s just a bowl of cherries” is the title of a 1931 Broadway number. “Life is just a bowl of cherries. It’s not serious. It’s too mysterious.” I link to an Ethel Merman recording here because she’s the one who inflicted this song on the inmates of New York’s theater trade.
This phrase clashes a bit with the British saying, “life’s not all beer and skittles.” Some readers among us may assume that’s a reference to candy, and I would like to know how many people, if any ever, would drink beer while eating Skittles. (Wait. Since I hamstring myself through perpetual research while blogging on trivia, I found a 2020 report of a beer brewed with Trix and Skittles, which goes to show, children, that if you believe in something hard enough, even a very bad idea can become a real boy.)
But life, as they say, is not all beer and skittles, meaning it’s not the intoxicating wonderland of your local pub wherein you can procure a brewed beverage and play a game of nine-pins–the ancient and venerable game called skittles!
The Gardens Trust did some research and writes, “Amongst the earliest references I could find are a couple of 14thc manuscripts which show a skittles game in which one skittle is bigger, differently shaped, and in most cases positioned so as to be the most difficult to knock over. According to a specialist website . . . the throwers in the pictures are about to throw a long club-like object at the skittles underarm.”
Life, having been around for as long as it has, gets credit for a lot of things. Oliver Wendell Holmes gave us these two:
- “Life is a great bundle of little things.” – The Professor at the Breakfast Table.
- “Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.” – The Poet at the Breakfast Table
Samuel Johnson tells us, “Life’s a short summer,” and you can imagine where the killjoy goes with that idea.
Let’s bring it back around with this suggestion from Joseph Addison. “I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.”
Life is much sweeter with birdsong. I’ve offered my neighborhood aviators club blackberries, and I’ve seen a few takers this summer. Maybe they prefer cherries.
Photo by Engin Akyurt/Pexels