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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I'm afraid 'brick is pulling your leg on this one. I've been listening to and watching baseball for about 50 years and I've never heard anything sung at the end of the game. This is a reference to an opera not being over until the last aria is sung, usually by the fat lady; it is an unfortunate truism that the diva is usually... zaftig -- that's how they generate those booming, dulcet tones. Once again, Quinion has the real story on this one, including the relation to Yogi Berra's "It ain't over till it's over." http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-ita1.htm
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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tsuwm, thanks for reinforcing what jo and I had responded, and for re-posting one of her links in case others might have missed it. 
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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yeah, by the time I got to the end of the thread I realized I had just mostly repeated y'all, but I tied everything together so well that I thought I'd just leave it -- hope you weren't inconvenienced too much. 8-)
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enthusiast
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OP
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does this mean "it's not over till the fat lady sings" (from opera) became fused with "it's not over till it's over" (from baseball) to become the use-anytime expression we know today?
i'm still not sure when and where the expression made its debut.
incidentally, singing opera involves the stomach muscles: as the diaphragm descends the lungs fill with air. for the diaphragm to descend the stomach has to expand. just like how you breathe when you're sleeping on your back. many of the "fat ladies" aren't fat, just exercising their developed stomach muscles.
a former girlfriend (!) was informed "you'll have to lose your waist" by her singing teacher.
fortunately i myself never had one to lose.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I don't think there's any 'fusion' except for 'confusion', as in Berra's mind when he said some of these things. 
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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>>yeah, by the time I got to the end of the thread I realized I had just mostly repeated y'all, but I tied everything together so well that I thought I'd just leave it -- hope you weren't inconvenienced too much. 8-) <<
Not at all! I don't know what we of the weaker sex would do without a bearded one to form a coherent synthesis of and lend credibility to our thoughts - especially on something like baseball.
always depending on the kindness of strangers,
Blanche
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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If we create a new expression "it ain't over until the fat lady croaks" it will save all the explanations. You can either picture a diva with a sore throat or one throwing herself off the ramparts, like Tosca. Either way it makes a lot more sense!
(Alternatively we could use "circumferentially challenged").
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Forgive my ignorance, but who is Yogi Berra? He seems to get quoted a lot but I've no idea who he is. A baseball player? Rock musician? Hippy? All three?
Bingley
Bingley
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> Forgive my ignorance, but who is Yogi Berra? He seems to get quoted a lot but I've no idea who he is. A baseball
player? Rock musician? Hippy? All three?
Lawrence 'Yogi' Berra was one of the all-time great catchers (the guy dressed like an armadillo standing behind the batsman) in American Baseball and played for the New York Yankees (alongside Joe DiMaggio et al) for almost twenty years before becoming their manager. Despite his colourful nickname he was not named after the cartoon character - rather it was the othere way around! A colleague remarked on the way he walked- 'Just like an Indian nsakecharmer!' The name stuck and the rest, as they say, is arbitrary. I'll leave it to the aficionados to give the statistics.
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> I'm afraid 'brick is pulling your leg on this one. I've been listening to and watching baseball for about 50 years and I've never heard anything sung at the end of the game. Well, sorry about that. Looks like we're doing a conga of leg-pulling cos I was leg-pulled about this long before I posted my first reply. I see that I have only contributed to a long line of misinformation. In future I will double-check my references before posting. Hark! I hear the dulcet, warbling tones of a well-defined diva. Now what can that mean??
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