Retire has a connotation of withdrawal that repair lacks, I think. The ladies retire to the drawing room because it was the withdrawing room, whereas the men repair to the library for brandy and cigars. Retire is still sometimes used in this way in the UK: in cricket, players are said to "retire injured" if they have to head back to the pavilion because they are unable to play on. But I’ve never heard repair used other than humorously.
"I think I’ll retire for the evening, James."
"Same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?"
"Same procedure as every year, James."
"Then I’ll do my best!"
Can you place it?
Ilka
P.S.
Happy New Year, everyone. It just came by here 2 hours ago. Grant’s well into it, too, by now. Coming your way quickly over the pond!
[quote author=ilka link=board=idiom;num=1041294383;start=0#2 date=12/31/02 at 19:46:17]Can you place it?
Dinner for One!
No-one but the Germans watch this at New Year, or (I suspect) ever. It’s the strangest New Year tradition I know.
A German friend (the same woman who told me about JFK’s jelly doughnut) showed me a recording a few years ago, and she seemed to be completely unable to stop laughing throughout the whole thing, despite having seen it many times before.
[quote author=ilka link=board=idiom;num=1041294383;start=0#4 date=01/01/03 at 17:34:15] . . . What also seemed out of place to me here when I first came was fireworks. To me, fireworks were for the 4th of July and the 4th of July only!
Ilka
Uh, I have some news for you. Fireworks are part of New Year’s celebrations, and have been (or at least the noisemaking of firecrackers has been) for almost as long as I can remember. The cracks and booms start up just before midnight, even though they are illegal in Maryland. You’ll also be in for a big surprise at Walt Disney World in Florida, unless they are banned again due to drought-induced fire conditions, as they were four years ago when we were there. My problem was that the only time we could see fireworks was on the 4th. I couldn’t get enough of them.
Oh, really? That does make me wonder, uneasily, where I’ve been all these years!
Your last sentence doesn’t seem to agree with the rest of what you’re saying, though. Or did you mean to emphasize that you didn’t actually see fireworks, only heard them, except for on the 4th of July?
As for watching fireworks on TV, they are singularly unimpressive on the screen, don’t you think? That was confirmed once again two days ago.
Ilka, I think Stargzer is referring to two different types of fireworks. The big, awesome kind, we only see on Fourth of July celebrations. Some places have fairly decent fireworks on New Year’s Eve as well, but they don’t compare to the Independence Day variety, at least to my knowledge.
New Year’s Eve has many people doing the smaller, less impressive variety, although they are illegal in many states. (Here in NC they are illegal too, but you can cross the state line into SC and grab almost whatever you want… So much for restrictions!)
Anyway, it sounded to me like Stargzer was talking about the grand fireworks on July 4th and the homegrown variety at other times.
After we moved in to our house, we had the lovely treat of discovering that we can see all the local towns’ fireworks of the 4th of July (and Father’s Day!!) We’re down by the beach and have a clear view to the east, beyond the salt marsh that pokes up from the Atlantic between our house and the next part of Long Island.
What really surprised me is how low the fireworks really are when they explode. When standing underneath them, they seem so high in the sky! The ones we can see from our living room, which were exploding on the beach, I guess, seemed to fill the sky. The ones we can only see from the bedroom windows, far down by the eastern horizon, got smaller and closer to the horizon—some were as small as grapes right over the trees!
Virginia and Washington DC also sell fireworks, and I think Pennsylvania does, too. Maryland allows the sale of some, but not any spectactular ones (like Whistling Jupiters or Parachutes). I can remember in the past when Maryland would station someone in DC near a fireworks stand and if a car with Maryland plates bought fireworks and headed back toward Maryland, they’d call their plates in and have them stopped and searched. Boo. Hiss.
My father used to load up on fireworks when his Marine Corps Reserve unit went to Cherry Point, NC. When I was a kid my parents used to have big gatherings at our house on the 4th but we had to move them to a friend’s house in Washington DC when the Hyattsville police started making rounds on the 4th. Still, we had fun before we were forced to move the party. I remember a family friend putting a cherry bomb under a bucket at our house. It blew the bucket about 8 or 10 feet in the air and blew the seam out about three quarters of the way around the bottom. As Darth Vader said: "Impressive!" :D Sometime later, at one of the parties in DC, I dropped a fake firecracker (an empty red cardboard cylider with a fuse attached) in the lap of the guy who blew up the bucket at our house. You wanna see someone move fast? ;D
The big fireworks usually go off several hundred feet in the air, tamisaac, so the low ones you see are farther away (I think it’s a question of perspective as well as the curvature of the Earth (if they are far enough away)). In Hyattsville, we used to go to several streets that were high on a hill and watch the higher-exploding fireworks on the Mall in Washington DC. At Kill Devil Hills, NC, we sat on the beach and watch fireworks at several places up and down the beach from Kitty Hawk to Nags Head.
When properly supervised by adults, fireworks can be safe. People injured by fireworks are generally examples of Natural Selection at work. IMHO
Dinner for One is a short British cabaret sketch from the 1920s that was filmed in 1963 in black and white. It’s about a rich old lady who has outlived her beloved friends and "invites" them for dinner every year for her birthday. Her butler James faithfully serves them and pours many rounds of drinks, all of which he drinks for the guests in turn, toasting Miss Sophie every time. He gets progressively more drunk as the evening progresses. It’s hilariously funny, depending on your sense of humor, of course.
For some unknown reason, it’s become a sort of a cult film here that’s shown again and again on TV on New Year’s Eve.
Wow, I have never heard of that, and I thought I Knew Everything About Film (especially cult films.) But they don’t play that here on New Year’s, it sounds too low-key by American standards. Instead they show all the idiots in Times Square watching a disco ball "drop." (Which it doesn’t, really - it slowly descends, but inevitably someone will ask you afterwards, "Did you see the ball drop?")
By the way, speaking of fireworks (no, this isn’t a lead-in to the ‘offense’ discussion on another thread ), didn’t the Chinese invent the use of fireworks for celebratory purposes and use them on their new year?
), didn’t the Chinese invent the use of fireworks for celebratory purposes and use them on their new year?
