You’ve got to love the peculiarities of the english language. Why do you watch actors ON TV, but when you trek to a cinema, you watch them IN the movies?
It shall remain one of life’s many unanswered questions, until someone smarter than this humble engineer (perhaps an english teacher) can please explain!
Did you ever wonder what ACME stood for on the Road Runner show? Well, I looked up ACME in the Acronym Geek website to see what I could find. Of the 320 ACME entries, here were a few possibilities:
The last is probably the most likely, but on further investigation, it would appear that the words were added later by others. Back in the early 1920’s when business directories were created, people would come up with names which began with A, in order to get themselves further upfront in the alphabetized listing. Chuck Jones, Road Runner cartoonist, explained it below.
‘We were little madcaps along the beach and we did what we enjoyed doing and could get dirty and could eat hot dogs and so on. Since we had to search out our own entertainment, we devised our own fairy stories. If you wanted a bow and arrow you got a stick. If you wanted to conduct an orchestra you got a stick. If you wanted a duel you used a stick. You couldn’t go and buy one; that’s where the terms acme came from. Whenever we played a game where we had a grocery store or something we called it the ACME corporation. Why? Because in the yellow pages if you looked, say, under drugstores, you’d find the first one would be Acme Drugs. Why? Because “AC” was about as high as you could go; it means the best; the superlative.’
And for 3 time related quotes:
I wanted to create a cartoon with three animals deprived of hearing, seeing and speaking. The former two were easy to come up with suitable candidates, but the latter was a tad more difficult. I mean, is it possible to be born without a mouth? Well, yes it is, if you are the gnat of the glow-worm. The humble glow-worm starts its life as an egg (3 weeks), it then becomes a larvae (9 months – as the glow-worm), followed by a pupa (2 weeks), to finally emerge as a gnat. And the gnat doesn’t have a mouth! This probably explains why it only lives long enough to lay eggs and that’s it (about 3 days).
