Popular Culture
- A nail trimmer is concealed in a Bible by inmate Frank Morris in the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz.
- Julio Cortázar provides a (presumably false) history of nail cutters in his novel Hopscotch:
- "Think of a repertory of insignificant things, the enormous work which goes into studying them and gaining a basic knowledge of them. A history of nail cutters, two thousand volumes to acquire the certain knowledge that until 1675 these small things had never received any mention. Suddenly in Mainz someone does a picture of a woman cutting a nail. It is not exactly a pair of nail cutters, but it looks like it. In the eighteenth century a certain Philip McKinney of Baltimore patents the first nailcutters with a spring attached: the problem is solved, the fingers can squeeze with all their strength to cut toenails, incredibly tough, and the cutters will snap back automatically. Five hundred notes, a year of work."
Read more about this topic: Nail Clipper
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“No race has the last word on culture and on civilization. You do not know what the black man is capable of; you do not know what he is thinking and therefore you do not know what the oppressed and suppressed Negro, by virtue of his condition and circumstance, may give to the world as a surprise.”
—Marcus Garvey (1887–1940)