Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff, Lauren
Speaker 1: Vogelbaum here. For as much as cigars give off smoke
Speaker 1: that'll stick to your clothes, they've also spawned some similarly
Speaker 1: sticky idioms In the English language. There's sometimes a cigar
Speaker 1: is just a cigar, a meaning that you can't always
Speaker 1: attribute Fredian sub meetings to things. The quote is often
Speaker 1: attributed to Freud himself, but that seems to be apocryphal.
Speaker 1: Another one that's slightly old fashioned but still kicking around
Speaker 1: is what we need is a good five cent cigar,
Speaker 1: which was popularized in the nineteen teens by then Vice
Speaker 1: President of the United States Thomas Riley Marshall. If you're unfamiliar,
Speaker 1: it means that what we need is something that's sensibly
Speaker 1: affordable but still pragmatically useful, as opposed to something overly
Speaker 1: complicated or expensive. He said it during a senate debate
Speaker 1: about our country's needs. But perhaps more common these days,
Speaker 1: if not less old fashioned, there's the phrase close but
Speaker 1: no cigar. Oh. When someone said this to you, you
Speaker 1: probably didn't ask for a cigar. Maybe you don't even
Speaker 1: like them. So why is someone abruptly denying you one.
Speaker 1: This phrase is most often used when someone is nearly
Speaker 1: but not quite successful at something like a football player
Speaker 1: drops an easy catch, or a desperate commuter runs but
Speaker 1: misses their bus pulling away from the bus stop, or
Speaker 1: a math student doesn't catch a critical detail and screws
Speaker 1: up their whole equation. These are all situations worthy of
Speaker 1: a close but no cigar. The gist is obvious to
Speaker 1: anyone who grew up hearing it spoken among their friends
Speaker 1: and family. Yet even if you understand what close but
Speaker 1: no cigar means, you might wonder exactly where this idiom originated.
Speaker 1: After all, what do cigars have to do with success?
Speaker 1: It turns out cigars were once used as prizes for
Speaker 1: carnival games in the United States in the early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: These games of skill or chance were often exasperatingly difficult,
Speaker 1: and most people failed to win a prize. Such games
Speaker 1: are still a feature of fairs today. Think of ring
Speaker 1: tosses that never seemed to land, or basketball hoops that
Speaker 1: spit out every ball thrown their way. When cigars were
Speaker 1: the prizes. After a participant failed, a carnival barker or
Speaker 1: the game runner might shout close but no cigar. The
Speaker 1: phrase close but no Cigar appeared in the script for
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirty five film Annie Oakley, but there were
Speaker 1: earlier recorded uses, both in sports reporting and in national
Speaker 1: geographic magazine. No matter who printed it first, it seems
Speaker 1: that the phrase traveled quickly through the American vernacular because
Speaker 1: of the way that carnivals moved from place to place.
Speaker 1: In an article for the magazine Cigar Ficionado, the editor
Speaker 1: of the Yale Book of Quotations, wrote that the game
Speaker 1: in question was specifically one of those games of strength
Speaker 1: called the high ball or high striker, where the player
Speaker 1: uses a large hammer to strike a lever and send
Speaker 1: a weight to high enough up a column to ring
Speaker 1: a bell at the top. But it seems that several
Speaker 1: different games might have inspired the phrase, and in other
Speaker 1: countries as well. In nineteen oh two, a book called
Speaker 1: The Night Side of London described many social scenes and
Speaker 1: entertainments throughout Bustling Edwardy in London, including a traveling carnival
Speaker 1: with games to play. A quote another penny gives you
Speaker 1: the privilege of trying to roll three balls into certain
Speaker 1: holes with numbers attached there on two. Should you score twenty,
Speaker 1: you will win a cigar, but you do no more
Speaker 1: than score nine. Undiscouraged or perhaps encouraged by this fact,
Speaker 1: you spend another penny, and another and another, but you
Speaker 1: don't get the cigar. And it is well for you
Speaker 1: that you don't, for there are cigars and cigars on
Speaker 1: you go, and next you try your hand at the coconuts,
Speaker 1: or the skittles, or the clay pipes, or in the
Speaker 1: shooting alleys, and so on and on until your stock
Speaker 1: of pennies and patience is exhausted. Cigars are no longer
Speaker 1: offered as prizes to carnival goers, though these days we
Speaker 1: have to settle for oversized stuffed animals or the like.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is based on the article why do we
Speaker 1: say close but no Cigar? On HowStuffWorks dot Com, written
Speaker 1: by Nathan Chandler. Brain Stuff is production of by Heart
Speaker 1: Radio in partnership with hostuffwork dot Com and is produced
Speaker 1: by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.