Said The Actress to the Bishop (That’s What She Said)
This blog stuff, as totally lame as it may seem to some of you, has been a great deal of fun for me. You will probably never know the hesitation I experienced before hitting the enter key to publish my own words for the first time. I think many of you know that I post to my Facebook page regularly, and I also think that often, my random words are passed off as, “well, DBeazy has a few drinks on board, let’s see what he is up to.” But the truth is, I do enjoy writing, and while I’m not nearly good enough at it to live out the rest of my days in a mountain cabin, sitting on the back deck writing the next great novel, I wouldn’t be opposed to my craft supplementing my income in some way. I have some plans, some goals, and even some dreams of moving toward that reality in the future, but as for today, I crank out the words hoping that 40 or 50 people will click on my link and genuinely enjoy the reading of my prose.
Some days, the words don’t flow as easily as on others. It’s often a difficult task to ignore the utter noise that the world brings, but it is necessary to focus and commit words to the virtual page. I am totally honest when I say that I’m driven by the successes of my stories. The necessary “behind the scenes” stuff like website analytics, post counters, hit counters, and the like, present to me a pretty good scorecard of what people are taking the time to click on. Suffice it to say that left up to me, I’d write about riding the Ultra and stories of my experiences on 2 wheels and not much more. But I consider the fact that one of my biggest supporters is not a fan of the motorcycle stories but prefers the more abstract stories that have a deeper meaning and she likes descriptive stories, like Dancing with “X” Girl. The reader who prefers the more humorous stories is also one to be considered. So I try to mix it up and write for the masses, hoping to provide something for every reader that clicks on the site.
At any rate, I was thinking the other day about the sayings that are popular around the world and that political correctness has dictated the way that we speak and often how we think. This isn’t always a bad thing, because I really want to live in a world where the phrase “That’s what she said” never existed.
This is a saying that has been done to death. This double entendre was, I thought, born out of a need for plausible deniability for sexual harassment in the workplace. I hear that the guy from the TV show, The Office, used that line in several episodes, though I have never watched the program. I mean I have heard it used in many varied situations and the one constant is that the one delivering the “punch line” is the one who is laughing the loudest. In fact, in this situation, you will see that some will laugh, guardedly, and others will kind of just smile, but nobody is as “comfortable” with the joke as the one telling it. The reason is that it is WRONG. So I came home and did some research on “That’s what she said.”
I found something interesting in the history of the phrase. While most think that this phrase is the product of a popular TV program, but it was first documented as being used by Chevy Chase in a 1975 Saturday Night Live skit. For a while, “That’s what she said” became a regular saying in the “Weekend Update” segment of the show.
Even more interesting is that the use of the phrase has roots that go back to a British version in the very early 1900s. As the story goes, many British stage actresses whose company could be purchased after their performance. Apparently, it was a fairly common practice and a way for actresses to supplement their incomes. The phrase “said the actress to the Bishop” was a reference to the actresses confessing their sinful ways to the Bishop.
Hopefully, it won’t become necessary, but in the event that you hear someone say, “That’s what she said,” and they have you in a position where you can’t just walk away, well, now at least you have recourse. Maybe they will think twice before throwing it out there when you blast off a history lesson of the phrase.
As luck would have it though, this very afternoon, I overheard a female coworker saying, “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” then followed it with her own, “That’s what she said.” I’m pretty sure that this was the first time I heard a woman use the phrase, and I thought, “There’s no sense in letting the ‘PC’ crowd ruin all the fun.”