Eleventh Hour
The idiom ‘eleventh hour’ has been a potential blog post title twice before because it seems that I often sit to write at the last hour of the day which so happens to be 11.
It is often my attempt to eek out a post before the days-end.
I know I’ve used that phrase before because basically through my young-adult life, that is how I got stuff done…at the 11th hour. I really never was curious about its origin until tonight.
I love that the internet can effortlessly give me a hint at what I am curious about. I say hint because I still hold the belief that you can’t trust everything you read on the internet.
I love that I get this curiosity from my dad. Who has an affinity for knowing a little bit about everything and a whole lot about some things (like flying).
My short journey on the Search Engine (toot toot) produced this information:
“Late; shortly before an anticipated event. Matthew’s parable of the laborers in
the vineyard (20: 2-16) has the men hired at the eleventh hour being paid as
much as the ones hired early in the morning, even though the eleventh-hour
people only worked for an hour. From this sense of being barely in time to
receive some benefit comes the concept of time running out.” ” From “The
Dictionary of Cliches” by James Rogers (Ballantine Books, New York, 1985).
I am grateful that I am able to post this at the 11th hour, by the skin-of-my-teeth, post haste!
Endnotes:
Skin of my teeth
Geneva Bible, 1560, in Job 19:20
Teeth don’t have skin, of course, so the writer may have been alluding to the teeth’s surface or simply to a notional minute measure – something that might now be referred to, with less poetic imagery than the biblical version, as ‘as small as the hairs on a gnat’s bollock’.
Post haste:
1545, usually said to be from “post haste” instruction formerly written on letters (attested from 1538), from post (3) “system for sending mail” + haste. The verb post “to ride or travel with great speed” is recorded from 1558.
Posted on December 12, 2013, in Uncategorized and tagged Everyday Life, Procrastination, wabi sabi. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.
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