Why is it always my aunt? My poor uncle, he feels left out.
I think the Yiddish version of this is, "If my grandmother had balls, she'd be my grandfather."
I heard it as "if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a trolley cart" and also sometimes "… a Volkswagen".
If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a teacart.
That's how I always heard it, although if my actual grandmother had treads, she'd have been a Sherman tank driven by a homicidal maniac.
2: Aunt, balls, uncle. Minimum disruption of the actual gene flow, unlike the g'mother one.
5: But not sure if it is Yiddish or not, just the way I heard it.
I thought it was, "If my aunt had balls, my uncle would have faced certain stricture given the discriminatory times in which he lived."
Historical counterfactuals are the last refuge of the nerd who isn't good at math.
In Polish it comes in two versions 'if aunt had wheels she'd be a bus' and 'if aunt had balls she'd be uncle'
8: In that case, Matt Yglesias probably struggles to add two single-digit numbers.
I thought of LB yesterday when I got to use, "If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs" in response to a friend expressing disappointment that we couldn't find enough people to get a pick-up game of cornhole going.
The version I grew up with didn't involve relatives at all. It was "if frogs had wings, they wouldn't bruise their butts".
I've never looked, but if many frogs get bruised butts, I'm going to reconsider my support for the theory of evolution.
If I recall Dan Rather from Election Night 2000 correctly, "If a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a pistol."
Didn't understand what he meant by that even a little. Worried about him a bit.
If a frog had butterfly wings, it wouldn't look in the least bit gay.
It was actually Election Night 2004 (watch this). Weird, because didn't Dan get fired during the 2004 campaign?
17: Huh. I could swear I remember him getting punchy late at night in 2000, and starting to talk all Texan folksy weird. But I might have moved that quote around in my head.
17: He was around until early 2005, after the suits had their bullshit self-exonerating report written (not saying Rather/Mapes didn't fuck up, but there was far more truth in their report than the one CBS commissioned). Here is a written collection of them from the 2000 election (also has the frog one).
What, really, he said it twice? That's extra scary.
With that much folksiness, he really should have had an answer ready for "What's the frequency Kenneth?"
Could be in his world it's a cliche, so he says it whenever it comes up. Where exactly his world is remains an open question.
I'm just so impressed that his research turned up such stunning scenarios.
This is just garden-variety academic publication bias. There are probably dozens of boring alternate histories of American Politics for every stunning one that turns up, but only the stunning ones get published.
If they'd hanged Jesus Christ, we'd all be kneeling in front of a fucking gibbet.
26: And if they'd fed him to the lions, after three days he would have arisen from the kitty litter box?
26 to 25. I forgot how this math thing works.