wombats in flight

[darkoshi]

I filled up my car's gas tank (from a quarter-full to full) for $12.27 today. Amazing. I can't remember gas prices ever being so low, even though apparently they were.

Yesterday at work while testing our screens, on a sudden inspiration, I entered a business client named "(my last name)'s Flying Wombats to the Rescue", and then continued testing, not thinking about it anymore. Later a co-worker stopped by my cube to thank me for giving him a chuckle - he happened to be looking at the database rows and was very amused when he saw my client's name.

Then I started wondering where the term "Flying Wombats" originally came from. Where had I heard it before? In a movie?

Turns out that there actually was a 1938 movie (that I don't recall ever having seen) that used the term "Flying Wombat" in reference to a kind of car. But I'm not clear if that was the origin of the term, or if the term was around even earlier than that movie. I wasn't thinking of cars myself, when I used the term. I was thinking of some kind of mythological flying creature (as regular wombats don't fly, of course).

There was also a BBC radio show that featured "The Curse of the Flying Wombat", but I'm not familiar with that either. So I'm still not sure how I became familiar with the term.

Comments

Flying Wombats

[(Anonymous)]

Have you heard the term "when pigs fly." I believe flying wombats may have the same meaning. "When pigs fly" is an adynaton, a way of saying that something will never happen.

Re: Flying Wombats

[darkoshi]

I'm not sure... The phrase "when wombats fly" only has 9 results on Google. I think "flying wombats" is used more often in a joking sense, rather than a negating sense. But I hadn't heard of the word "adynaton" before - that is a nice one to know.