[OFB Cafe] Tuesday, Boris the Mayor, and Thomas the Rhymer

[Derek Broughton]

On August 4, 2008 17:46:08 saki wrote:
> Derek Broughton wrote:
> > Last week I finally got around to watching Season 3 of the new Doctor Who
> > (Terence would have to know what that is, but for the rest of you you
> > need to have either been born in the UK as I was, or be terminally geeky
> > - which I suppose also applies).
> >
> > In the episode "The Lazarus Experiment", there were at least two Eliot
> > quotes (though I have to admit "not with a bang but a whimper" is
> > slightly overused).
>
> "Not with a bang" has really entered the language along with
> E=MC(squared), 42, Catch 22 and a few (!) lines from an
> Elizabethan/Jacobean playwright whose name also escapes me.

Well, "42" was the title of the next episode and there was an episode where 
the Doctor was giving that Elizabethan playwright lines...
>
> On the other hand so have words like Sellotape and Hoover, so what price
> literary fame?

Not on this side of the pond.  It's Scotch tape and ... well nothing, really.  
I suspect there's a rather greater tendency to defend trademarks here.  
-- 
derek