Tag: Unsolved Mysteries

Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic

RORY: You’re still doing okay?
JESS: Doing my reading, writing, and arithmetic.
RORY: And you’re still going, right?

Reading, writing, and arithmetic, the basic skills taught in schools, and often used as a shorthand to refer to schooling or education in general. They have been referred to together as far back as the writings of St Augustine, in the 4th century.

Jess has not shared with Rory that he is barely (or ever?) going to school any more, showing that their relationship is not as close as Rory might think. From comments by Lorelai, it seems as if Rory only sees Jess on weekends. This is really different from when she was with Dean, but she is in her senior year of high school, and may not have as much time to spend with a boyfriend.

Another difference between her relationship between Jess and Dean is that Rory nagged Dean quite a bit about his academic ambitions, and encouraged him to apply to college. Yet Rory only tentatively asks Jess whether he is regularly attending school, and makes a diffident offer to help him with his work if needed.

Has she learned to be a bit more hands off, or does she lack the confidence to question Jess the way she would have with Dean? Jess is very good at keeping people at an emotional distance, and it looks as if he has done it even with his own girlfriend.

Punch

LORELAI: So, how was Jess’ Employee of the Month thing? …
LUKE: There was punch.

The term punch refers to a wide assortment of drinks, both non-alcoholic and alcoholic, generally containing fruits or fruit juice. The drink was introduced from the Indian subcontinent to England in the 17th century. Punch is usually served at parties in large, wide bowls, known as punch bowls. Historically it was made with alcohol, such as rum, but punch for children is usually a mix of fruit juice and soda.

For reasons which escape me, commercially sold punch in the US cannot contain fruit or fruit juice, even if it is actually sold as “fruit punch”. It is a mystery to me what this “fruit punch” actually consists of.

“He was a troubled man”

RORY: He was a troubled man. He enjoyed a little bit too much of the hmm-hmm. [makes a drinking gesture]

Edgar Allan Poe has been described as a drunkard or an alcoholic, but many of these stories about him were spread by his rivals and enemies. He did sometimes drink too much, and didn’t handle alcohol very well (so that even a little was probably too much for him), but it was often months or even years between bouts of drinking. He might perhaps be best described as a binge drinker. It is sometimes speculated that alcohol played some part in his death, but this cannot be verified.

Jawboning

MANAGER: [to Luke]Hey. Saw you jawboning with our boy there.

Jawboning, informal American English meaning to influence or pressure by strong persuasion, usually used in a political context. Luke wasn’t really doing anything like that with Jess, so either the manager is being very protective of his star worker, or he is confusing the word with jawing, meaning “to talk, to scold”.

Satchmo

LORELAI: You named the spider Satchmo?
SOOKIE: After Jackson’s uncle.

Satchmo was the nickname of trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong, previously mentioned. The nickname is short for “Satchelmouth”, but its origin is not known. Some say simply because of the size of Armstrong’s mouth, while a story favoured by biographers is that as a young boy in New Orleans, Armstrong would dance for pennies, collecting the coins in his mouth to prevent bigger children from taking them from him.

Jackson’s uncle was apparently named after the short form of a celebrity’s nickname in honour of Louis Armstrong.

Portland

KIRK: I got the idea when I read about something a man was doing in Portland.
LORELAI: What was he doing?
KIRK: He was printing daily T-shirts featuring a humorous topical headline of something he witnessed around town.

Portland, a port city and the largest city in Oregon, in the Pacific North West of the US. It has a population of around 600 000. Named after Portland in Maine, the settlement began to be populated in the 1840s, as it was near the end of the Oregon Trail which led wagon trains to the west. Beginning in the 1960s, Portland became noted for its growing liberal and progressive political values, earning it a reputation as a hip bastion of counterculture.

I have been unable to discover if the man in Portland with the tee shirt business was real, or fictional. I have found no trace of him, and suspect he may be the writer’s idea of something quirky that people in Portland might do.

“I always meant to call you”

LORELAI: I always meant to call you, but I’m not good at calling when a call is really necessary. And then, you know, uh, if you don’t call for awhile, it gets harder to call, and then after awhile, it feels like it’s too late to call, and so you don’t, although you always know that you should’ve called, and I should’ve called … I never really explained what happened … I don’t think I didn’t love you. I think . . . I think I was not ready to get married.

It’s unclear from Lorelai’s explanation to Max whether she means that she never phoned after jilting him to apologise or check he was okay, or whether she simply took off on the road trip with Rory and never told him anything at all. Lorelai seems a little unsure as to whether she ever loved Max, but she is surely correct that she was not ready to get married.

Sookie is Pregnant

SOOKIE: Oh my God, I’m pregnant! …
RORY: That’s great!
[they all scream and hug]

Lorelai suggests to Sookie she may have some kind of minor illness affecting her taste buds, then she goes into the lobby to talk to Rory, before Sookie comes out of the kitchen and announces she’s pregnant.

Pregnancy can certainly affect the sense of taste of smell, explaining Sookie’s suddenly horrible food, so this makes sense – but how can Sookie be sure? Did she just throw up in the toilet (which could be something else), did she do the world’s quickest pregnancy test, and if she had one all along, why didn’t she use it before? Has she had some other little sign, like her periods stopping, breast tenderness, and weight gain, and she’s put all the clues together?

Who knows? She just apparently knows she’s pregnant, even though she’s seemingly never been pregnant before, and everyone gets super excited and jumps around hugging each other. Nobody asks Sookie how she knows, or suggests she might be mistaken, or that it might need to be verified by, oh I don’t know, science.

“Sookie never gets sick”

LORELAI: I don’t know. It’s weird, Sookie must be sick or something.
RORY: Sookie never gets sick.

In fact, Sookie said that she had a little bug the week before. Later events suggest this may have been morning sickness, since we never learn exactly what this “bug” entailed. Although only a scriptwriter who has never been pregnant would think of morning sickness as a “little bug”, so I don’t know.