Sometimes a star is just a star
Posted by: roscivs, in UncategorizedOne of the coolest Google features (from a corpus linguistics point of view) is the ability to do wildcard searches in the middle of phrases.
For example, if you search for “what has * here”, Google will find all pages that have that phrase with something substituted for the asterisk. This lets you see first of all what word is most common in such a phrase (in this case, “happened”). Or you might be looking for different variations of the phrase (such as “transpired”, which shows up on the first page).
In my most recent case, I heard the phrase “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” a cautionary tale against reading too much into things, and I was interested in the origins of the phrase. Why is the word “cigar” used, as opposed to any other number of ordinary objects? It turns out that the phrase is a very popular one for substitutions: a search for “sometimes a * is just a *” reveals eight different alternatives to “cigar”, such as “snake”, “squirrel”, and “fool”—just on the front page. Paging through the results, there’s no end to variations on the phrase.
The origin of the phrase, and the reason for the word choice, appears to trace back to Sigmund Freud. Freud, of course, is infamous for his sexual imagery, constructing elaborate meanings for everyday items or occurrences, framing them in terms of repressed sexuality. He also commonly smoked cigars. One day, according to legend, a cheeky student asked him what his obsession with cigars signified. Freud allegedly responded, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
I have no way of knowing whether this story is accurate, but of all the times Freud seemed to read too much into something seemingly innocuous, this was one time I wonder if he didn’t read quite enough into it. Perhaps he was protesting too much his innocence?
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