{"id":89936,"date":"2025-09-24T06:38:18","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T11:38:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=89936"},"modified":"2025-09-24T06:38:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T11:38:20","slug":"lost-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=89936","title":{"rendered":"Lost"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Joe Doakes, long ago of Como. Park, emails:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<div dir=\"auto\">\n<div dir=\"auto\">People keep using the phrase &#8220;go to the mattress&#8221; when talking about fighting. &#8220;Republicans must go to the mattress over this issue.&#8221;<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">\u00a0<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">No dummy, it&#8217;s &#8220;mat,&#8221; as in wrestling mat, as in &#8220;take your opponent to the mat to pin him.&#8221;\u00a0 Didn&#8217;t your high school have a wrestling team?<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">\u00a0<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">\u00a0But of course some idiot didn&#8217;t understand that 20 years ago and wrote the dialogue wrong in a movie. So now the internet thinks that&#8217;s the origin of the phrase. Or possibly that it relates to 15th century Italians who hung mattresses on the walls to deflect cannon fire.\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 You figure people today know so much about Renaissance warfare that they use it everyday speech? Ridiculous.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">\u00a0<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">\u00a0How does society recover a lost idiom?<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">\u00a0<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">Joe Doakes<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>By doing more wrestling.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>(And I think it was Clemenza, not Puzo, that got the term wrong.\u00a0 \u00a0Which, if true, I think is hilarious).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joe is ready to go to the&#8230;well, just read the article.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89936"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89937,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89936\/revisions\/89937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}