Quote of the Day: “‘Shut up, he explained”

The lease said about me and my father’s trip from the Bureau of Manhattan to our new home the soonest mended. In some way either I or he got balled up on the grand concorpse and next thing you know we was thretning to swoop down on Pittsfield.

Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly.

“Shut up he explained.”–Ring Lardner, The Young Immigrunts

Breathes there a parent with soul so dead that, at some point, he or she has never wanted to turn around from the front seat of the car, while in the throes of a travel nightmare, and deal the whining young miscreant in the back a swift clip on the ear?

Ring Lardner had, obviously, so been there.

His story, “The Young Immigrunts,” first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in February of 1920, and was a response to the recently successful publication of The Young Visiters, a book which its adult authoress, Daisy Ashford, claimed to have written when she was nine years old. Lardner disbelieved this claim (as did many others), and satirized it in his own story, which detailed his family’s move from Chicago to Connecticut, and was purportedly written in the persona of his four-year old son.

And so a four-word, incredibly useful, multi-purpose, and always apt, imperative sentence entered the lexicon. And has never left.

Ring Lardner, one of the few twentieth-century American writers I actually admire, died 91 years ago today, on September 25, 1933.  There’s been a hell of a lot of water under the bridge since then.  Yet, here we still are.

Now I’ve explained the reasoning behind this post, I have nothing more to say. And so, I’ll shut up (for) now. Don’t expect it to last.

*The photo at the top of the post is from 1926, and shows the Muffetts going on holiday in the family car. Dad is the one who (at the age of seven) has assumed command with his arm stretched out on the windshield.  Imagine my surprise.