{"id":18221,"date":"2020-05-02T09:59:11","date_gmt":"2020-05-02T16:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18221"},"modified":"2020-05-02T10:00:20","modified_gmt":"2020-05-02T17:00:20","slug":"as-who-should-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2020\/05\/02\/as-who-should-say\/","title":{"rendered":"as who should say"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Reading a Thurber essay about Henry James, I came across this phrase:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>James\u2019s Renunciation Scene is managed, as who should say, rather more exquisitely than Hammett\u2019s<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>I hadn\u2019t encountered the phrase <i>as who should say<\/i> before, so I mentally marked it to look up later, and I kept reading. On the next page, Thurber writes:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>That is simply, as who should not say, one of those rococo coincidences.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>(Speaking of coincidences: that sentence is in reference to the character of Joel Cairo, from <cite>The Maltese Falcon<\/cite>, memorably portrayed (in the best-known movie version) by Peter Lorre. Cairo-played-by-Lorre was later parodied by Firesign Theatre with the character Rocky Rococo. Now I\u2019m wondering whether <i>rococo<\/i> was sometimes code for \u201cgay.\u201d My dictionary doesn\u2019t answer that question, though it does say that one meaning of <i>rococo<\/i> is \u201cof or relating to an 18th century musical style marked by light gay ornamentation.\u201d I am amused.)<\/p>\r\n<p>ANYWAY.<\/p>\r\n<p>I looked up <i>as who should say<\/i> online, and immediately found a couple of definitions, but they weren\u2019t useful ones for me:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>The first one I found, from various dictionaries, was \u201cas if one should say.\u201d I have no idea what that means.<\/li>\r\n  <li>The second, from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lexico.com\/definition\/as_who_should_say\">Lexico<\/a>, was slightly clearer: \u201cas if to say.\u201d Example phrase: \u201che meekly bowed to him, as who should say \u2018Proceed.\u2019\u201d That\u2019s clearer, but it still makes no sense in the context of the Thurber sentences.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>Finally, I checked Merriam-Webster, as I should have from the start. It has no entry for <i>as who should say<\/i> per se, but under the entry for <i>who<\/i>, it defines <i>as who should say<\/i> thusly: \u201c<i>archaic<\/i>: so to speak.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>So then I did a search for <i>as who should not say<\/i>, and found that the only instances of that phrase are from this Thurber essay.<\/p>\r\n<p>So I guess that Thurber\u2019s first line quoted above is using the phrase more or less the same way we would use <i>so to speak<\/i>, and his second line quoted above is a play on the phrase <i>as who should say<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n<p>At this point, I started to wonder about how and when <i>so to speak<\/i> came to be used to indicate unusual or figurative phrasing; but a quick search didn\u2019t answer that question, and I decided that I had spent enough time on this particular line of research.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-idioms","category-new-to-me-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18221"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18223,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18221\/revisions\/18223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}