Common Literary References You Probably Make Every Day-
Big Brother - the name of the omnipresent dictatorship in George Orwell's "1984". This term has come to suggest the government is over-monitoring its people and is used quite commonly by pundants, but its origins are literary.
Catch 22 - Aka a situation where, no matter what choice you make, something bad is going to happen. Joseph Heller actually created this term when he wrote his novel "Catch-22". And, no, 22 does not have a specific meaning behind it. First he wanted to go with "18", but another World War II novel had already been printed with that number in the title (Leon Uris's "Mila 18"). Next Heller tried "11" but the Rat Pack movie "Ocean's 11" had just come out a year earlier. At some point he started randomly picking numbers and ended up with 22. Why any number at all? Heller wanted to say that, when bureaucracy gets bad enough to cause such extremem problems, it will also been giving those problems numbers.
Women; can't live with them, can't live without them - From "Lysistrata", a Greek comedy written by Aristophanes circa 411 BCE. While translations vary, the most common is "These impossible women! How they do get around us! How true the saying: 'Can't live with them, or without them.'"
Lolita - Using the word "Lolita" to describe a sexually-advanced underage girl actually comes from the novel "Lolita", written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1955.
Yahoo - Coined by Jonathan Swift in "Gulliver's Travels". The main character ends up in a country ruled by horses how boss around deformed, brutish, primitive humans, called Yahoos.
From 11points.com which is quickly becoming my new favorite site.
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