Can anybody tell me where the phrase: someone “bleeds like Billy Sunday” comes from? My wife has come across this in a book she’s translating and I have no idea about it, except we don’t say it on USS Great Britain.
I’ll be munificent with my guanxi for helpful answers.
Billy Sunday was an evangelist…died in 1936. Had lots and lots of girlfriends. I think the movie “Elmer Gantry” was based on him. I have no idea what the idiom means but I have heard the phrase “praying and bleeding” to refer to overly religious types.
Billy gettin’ down!
Don’t know about the idiom in question, but the Grateful Dead reference Billy Sunday in a song. This from the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics:
[quote]Billy Sunday, listed in the Baseball Encyclopedia as William Ashley (The Evangelist) Sunday, was one of the founders of the American evangelistic movement–his heirs of today being Billy Graham, et al. He started out as a baseball player for major league teams in Chicago, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, beginning his sports career in 1883, quitting the game in 1890. He then began his religious career, starting out as a desk clerk at the YMCA, working his way up as a helper to itinerant preachers, and finally becoming the most popular evangelist of the time, preaching to huge crowds.
Sunday’s style was highly flamboyant, and included colloquial baseball lingo, which won him a mass audience. One important aspect of his road show was the music which accompanied it, which consisted of a huge choir, with piano and trombone accompaniment. The music is said to have been “far from unctuous; it approached the jazzy.”
[/quote]
I wonder if Billy Sunday ever faked a stigmata???, or if his sermons were so “powerful” and emotional that he would have been said to have “sweat blood”?
Thanks guys. Guanxi coming your way (if I can figure out how!)