In Chapter 24, the aides, assisted by two black boys, beat by a margin of twenty points the team that McMurphy and the other men get together on the ward. McMurphy's team, composed of Harding, Billy Bibbit, Scanlon, Fredrickson, Martini, and McMurphy, is slow and short. Chief says, "But something happened that let most of us come away feeling there’d been a kind of victory, anyhow." When a black guy named Washington is trying to get the ball, someone hits him with an elbow. Blood pours out of his nose and chest like "paint splashed on a blackboard," and his teammates have to hold him back as he yells at McMurphy. McMurphy's response is just to sit on the ball and pay no attention to Washington. Though the team made up of men on the ward loses, they have a kind of psychological victory by even having a team and by watching Washington bleed so profusely.
Does anybody know the etymology of the phrase "sweet dreams"? I tried googling but did not find anything satisfying. Is this a relatively new phrase of the modern world or has this been in use for some time? I think it's the latter one. Answer The OED has the interjection as "a farewell to someone going to bed" from the 20th century: 1908 Sears Roebuck Catal. 198/1 Tenor Solos..Good Bye, Sweet Dreams, Good Bye. But it goes back until at least the 19th and possibly 18th centuries. John Wolcot, writing under the pseudonym of Peter Pindar, used it in his poem "Orson and Ellen; A Legendary Tale" published in 1801: Also from 1801 in The infernal Quixote (Page 287) by Charles Lucas: In the March 1776 of The Universal Magazine was published "The Serenade. A Pastoral Tale. From the German of Gesner" , where the shepherd Daphnis watches over his beloved as she sleeps and sings: The same tale appears in 1776's as Idyl XI, " Daphnis ...
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