Monday, July 21, 2014

Never mind the madman for a moment.

It's the prom!

That's it! It's totally the prom!

It's exciting to get asked to the prom, it's THE social event of the school year, and the highlight of the evening is the announcement of the king and queen. (Or in this case kings and queens.) You get a fancy gown or rent a tux, and the people who are into proms are way into going to the prom.

Yes, this probably has nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes, and I apologize to those who came here something a little Sherlockian and found this bit of nonsense. But I just had to tell somebody, even if the thought is something probably thunk by a hundred before me, and the interweb was just sitting here.

It's totally the prom! And I'm not really a fan of proms. Oh, well.

But just to make this qualify as a proper Sherlockian blog post:

Could Sherlock Holmes have gone to prom? Since its earliest mentions on record seem to be American colleges circa 1894, he probably would have had to started his Irish-American stint as an older-looking Chicago college student in 1912 to have pulled that one off . . . no wait, he was hanging out with that teenaged American girl Mary Russell at one point. Teenaged American girls are always dragging random men to proms. And Holmes did like flowers, so he surely would have bought his date a corsage, for as he himself said "We have much to hope from flowers."

And there was that "promenade" in Lady Frances Carfax's disappearance. But Britain, happily, stayed clear of the American prom tradition until the 2000s. Young Watson might have decided to chevy his date around with a wicket, so that was perhaps for the best.

Proms. Why did it have to be proms . . . .

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