George Bailey: What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Hey. That’s a pretty good idea. I’ll give you the moon, Mary.
Mary: I’ll take it. Then what?
George Bailey: Well, then you can swallow it, and it’ll all dissolve, see… and the moonbeams would shoot out of your fingers and your toes and the ends of your hair… am I talking too much?
In It’s A Wonderful Life, George Bailey offers to lasso the moon for Mary, it’s a bid to impress her, an exaggeration, to express how much he likes her, a grand gesture, an impossible gesture, but made to show how much he cares.
Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high
This year, @pauljchambers wanted to impress a girl, wanted to show how much he wanted to see her, and how frustrated he was that the weather might prevent him from doing that and in a grandiose, and in hindsight incredibly silly, way Paul offered to lasso Sarah the moon, the rest you already know.
I don’t have the legal background to write about this case as David Allen Green does (http://bit.ly/cuySMu ), I haven’t asked a linguistics expert to analyze the tweet as Mark Phillips did on @flayman’s blog ( http://bit.ly/aqMjU1), I don’t have the writing skills of Graham Linehan who wrote the amazing “Prague 1965” about the case (http://bit.ly/agAqgS )
All I have is the feeling that this whole thing is WRONG, that it could have been me, it could have been anyone, who wrote that tweet,or a tweet similar to it about a thousand other irritations, and for a simple tweet to change a person’s life completely and irreversibly forever is an extraordinary turn of events.
People donated to the fund in their hundreds, and raised thousands and that is amazing and heartwarming, as is the immense volumes tweeted about the case, and retweeted. Next Thursday the appeal reconvenes and Twitter needs to raise it’s voice, Twitter needs to raise awareness about this, this case needs to trend and it needs to trend HUGE.
