So Greece must have either a really shitty political class or an entrenched elite that benefits from being in the Euro or both.
Anyway, it was a different time. If you wanted to send somebody a picture of a guy holding open his butthole, you had to find a camera, and a guy, and a photo lab that didn't enforce the rules. Then, you had to explain it was a joke, not a medical training aid.
Of course, how the knee is lubricated is itself an interesting topic. It's not just grease.
The link seems to be to the older piece, and I can't find the newer, quoted one...
Even more recently the Pres and VP were Bush and Dick, in fact.
LizardBreath is, as always, smart. The problem I have is that the poem is:
>Greece, her knee...
while the "joke" is:
>Grease her knees...
You have to amend the poem in order to make the "joke" work--and in so doing change what is being greased from one knee to two...
I was once in a bait shop where the restrooms were labeled Du-kukis and De-Bush or something like that. The 80s were really a horrible time.
I'm guessing the people in the room were thinking about horse racing. Or dog racing. "Maybe she'll go"
7: what? no, surely the joke works just as well (or badly) regardless of the number of knees.
Knees and niece are close. (I am a horrible person.)
Yeah, I don't think the singular/plural change compels the salacious interpretation. If something's stuck because the knee joints are frozen, you'd naturally grease both sides. (And, while maybe now I'm exposing myself as being just as prurient-minded as any Californian economist out there, a one-legged version of the salacious interpretation doesn't seem to me to be completely unworkable.)
It would be scary if I had to come to the conclusion that I am an *unusually* dirty-minded member of the set of commenters on Unfogged...
I don't see the big issue with the change from singular to plural either. I think the problem is with the analogy to a mechanical joint. Possibly this can be excused by the limitations of 19th century medical knowledge, but you can't just "grease" your knees. The friction of a properly functioning knee joint is several orders of magnitude below what can can get from any known grease. The lubrication of that joint depends on not just the fluid (which I'd think could be colloquially be called "grease"), but also surface of the joint and the pressure under which the fluid is constrained.
(But obviously, your question was phrased elliptically enough that it would have been completely incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't just as dirty-minded. So I haven't got a leg to stand on here, greased or ungreased.)
13, 15: You may actually have to accept that not only are you unusually dirty-minded by Mineshaft standards, you're also less pedantic than the typical commenter around here.
I thought it was an external knee grease scenario. Like elbow grease, but less can-do. Or less heavy lifting, anyway.
Having read The Wizard of Oz (with oft-oiled Tin Woodman) to my child very recently, I found the step to lubricating a joint a pretty short one. But actually my first image was, OK, Greece is down on bended knee, if you put some grease on the knobs of her knees, you can just push her along the floor. Scoot!
It seems to me that 'on bended knee' is a phrase that can mean one knee, both knees, or even no knees.
19 is the image that came to my mind too.
14 that's an entirely different paraphilia, LB.
While I'm giving draB a hard time, am I the only one who can't look at his pseud here without being reminded of the title of this story?
(Very plausibly, yes.)
I'm not sure I entirely buy LB's admittedly clever explanation. There was certainly a kind of coarse humor floating around at the turn of the century. Outright vulgarity or crassness would have been frowned on, but coarse double entendres were very common, even in mixed company (where it might not have been nice or quite bon ton or whatever).
I'm pretty sure I'm right. (Show of hands -- who's surprised?)
The clean-minded interpretation works well enough to justify the joke; it's not terribly funny, but it works. And the prurient interpretation is a tiny bit arcane -- like, the precise act suggested is probably not in the top ten things that one might suspect the Turks of wanting to do to a supplicant Greece. I'm not saying a contemporary of Roosevelt's mightn't have come up with the dirty interpretation in the privacy of their own mind, but I'd bet heavily that in a context where a polite person might be expected to indicate that they understood an intentionally coarse double entendre as such, even if by disapproving of it, that this joke would go right by them.
Traditionally, of course, one applies elbow grease. I suppose the knees are sufficiently analogous body parts that the same stuff might work.
Do you like Kipling?
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/02/like-kipling/
that sold 6 million postcards
19: In the movie version, Dorothy first encounters the Scarecrow by making prolonged eye contact directly with his crotch. She is short and he is a scarecrow on a stick so it sort of makes sense. A few minutes later, she encounters the Tin Woodman, also frozen in place and also a bit elevated, again with a prolonged stare at the crotch area.
It seems closest in form to, and most likely to be playing off, a statement about a vehicle and its wheels.
And Teddy, God bless him, has been going ever since!
That the story ends with this suggests the clean-minded reading, right? Surely Teddy wouldn't be going in the same sense, otherwise.
Not exactly on topic, but close. The boyfriend told me last night that the University of North Dakota is attempting to replace its mascot, formerly the Fighting Sioux. One possibility is that they'll become the Roughriders, which is not much better on offense to Native Americans and a definite loser in terms of dirtymindedness (although South Carolina did OK in terms of bros in white "Cocks" hats).
What's the Native American problem? The referent of Rough Riders is the Spanish American War, I thought.
I mean, I'm sure Roosevelt has something problematic in his relationship with Native Americans, given the era, but nothing's jumping to mind as unusually egregious.
32: Yes, the Teddy Roosevelt connection. He opened reservations in ND to white settlers. The line below seems too pat, but here it is anyway:
Roosevelt once said of Native Americans: 'I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.'
I can find a few references to "knee grease" used similarly "elbow grease" dating back to the 19th century but nothing to indicate that it was a common idiom.
22 is a sequel to Lord Dunsany's "How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon The Gnoles" to which I have alluded in the same context...
I don't fully understand either the supposedly salacious or the supposedly non-salacious interpretation of this story. Neither one makes sense.
It's a completely novel sex act.