Tuesday, September 02, 2014

Timely Fun

Looking at the calendar as I was thinking about this post I thought,

Wow, how time flies!
since today happens to be my brother's birthday, 29 days after mine. How time flies! When a birthday shows up, kind of like New Year's Eve, we do that kind of reminiscing. How time flies!

So I Googled the phrase for the fun of it. Here's some of what I came up with:
Time passes quickly, as in It's midnight already? Time flies when you're having fun, or I guess it's ten years since I last saw you—how time flies. This idiom was first recorded about 1800 but Shakespeare used a similar phrase, “the swiftest hours, as they flew,” as did Alexander Pope, “swift fly the years.”
-The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer. Retrieved August 31, 2014, from Dictionary.com
website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/time flies
Then there was the question, should it be "flies" or "flys?" Some of the answers, other than the red underlining of spell-checker:
Now you know that the plural of "fly" is "flies" and this pluralisation only applies when a word ends in a consonant+y. If there is a vowel before the"y", then you simply add an "s", as in monkeys, moneys, volleys, relays, etc. I know that wasn't your question, but it may help you spell the plurals of hundreds of words.

or

Do NOT, repeat do NOT listen to anyone who says that "flys" is correct at all. Flies is the plural of fly; whether referring to the plural of the insect or the verb form.
Which, I believe, settles that one.

Wikipedia told me something I didn't know:
Funny How Time Flies (When You're Having Fun)" is the seventh and final single from American R&B singer Janet Jackson's third studio album, Control (1986).


Then when you click on images you get, 
of course, the inevitable:

Or a reflection on the simple fact of the relativity of time and a play on the phrase with "old-time flies":

Finally, on another musical note, it is a 1958 single from country and pop singer, Jerry Wallace. So I might as well post that video and take us all back to the 50s so those of us who were around 56 years ago can say it again- how time flies.

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