Title
While Innes recalls encountering the phrase as the title of an old American pulp fiction crime magazine he had encountered - the phrase Death Cab for Cutie may have been coined by Richard Hoggart in his The Uses of Literacy, a 1957 book discussing British popular culture and a pioneering work in the cultural studies field. The term appears in Chapter 8, "The Newer Mass Art: Sex in Shiny Packets," under part C: "Sex and Violence Novels". Hoggart provides a list of "imitations" of the "terse, periodic titles" of these novels, including "Sweetie, Take It Hot"; "The Lady Takes a Dive"; "Aim Low, Angel"; "Sweetheart, Curves Can Kill"; and "Death-Cab for Cutie".
Ben Gibbard used the title of the song as the name of the rock band he founded in 1997, saying "The name was never supposed to be something that someone was going to reference 15 years on. So yeah, I would absolutely go back and give it a more obvious name."
Read more about this topic: Death Cab For Cutie (song)
Famous quotes containing the word title:
“And Reason kens he herits in
A haunted house. Tenants unknown
Assert their squalid lease of sin
With earlier title than his own.”
—Robert Bridges (1844–1930)
“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose.”
—Bible: Hebrew Ecclesiastes, 1:4-5.
Ernest Hemingway took the title The Sun Also Rises (1926)
“Et in Arcadia ego.
[I too am in Arcadia.]”
—Anonymous, Anonymous.
Tomb inscription, appearing in classical paintings by Guercino and Poussin, among others. The words probably mean that even the most ideal earthly lives are mortal. Arcadia, a mountainous region in the central Peloponnese, Greece, was the rustic abode of Pan, depicted in literature and art as a land of innocence and ease, and was the title of Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance (1590)