Off the wall?

Reader question:

Please explain “off the wall”, as in “he’s said some pretty off-the-wall stuff before…”

My comments:

To paraphrase, he’s said some pretty outrageous things before, so we’d better not to take it (what he’s just said) seriously.

Yes, but what’s off the wall? What wall?

“Off the wall” is probably an expression originating from the game of squash, a game in which players hit a ball off the wall. That’s what the “wall” is about. After a player hits the ball off the front and/or side walls, the receiver hits the ball back in the same way, hitting the ball against the front wall.

Spectators who are watching the game for the first time are kept busy watching the ball ricochet off the walls in rapid succession. Only after a while do they figure out exactly what’s going on.

Anyways, squash is considered a difficult to play because it is difficult for beginners. Well, all skill games are difficult for beginners, you may say and rightly so. Tennis and ping pong, for example. Volleyball and archery, likewise. I get it. But, still, squash is considered a difficult game for beginners because the ball travels irregularly after bouncing off a wall.

Precisely because of that, the phrase “off the wall” begins to stand for something said that’s unusual, unconventional, unexpected, outlandish, bizarre and shocking. If a person is described as off the wall, then the same thing is true – this person is irregular, out of control, crazy, unpredictable and what have you. In other words, he or she is off the grid, wild and irrational.

Or something like that.

Well, here are recent media examples to further illustrate the point:

1. John Kasich stuck to the formula again over the past three days.

Four more town-hall meetings — making 37 since July. A few private meet-and-greets. A short talk at a GOP Christmas party. Signing up supporters and planting seeds with those who aren’t quite there yet.

Presuming you have a good message and background, that’s the usual route to political success in New Hampshire.

...

Even those who haven’t made up their mind said they were taken with Kasich.

“I’m very performance-oriented,” Charlene Lovett, Claremont’s mayor-elect and a former Army intelligence officer, said after a meeting on Saturday with about 50 in her town’s community center. “I have to say I put a lot of weight behind somebody who’s actually done something.”

Bruce Perlo Sr., chairman of the Grafton County Republican Party in western New Hampshire, said Kasich has “an outstanding background” of experience in the private sector and state and federal government. But the lack of weight given to such qualifications is another quirk of this odd election.

“He has not seemed to have gained the traction among the faithful, if you know what I mean,” Perlo said.

The ultimate fate of Kasich — and Trump — in New Hampshire may come down to what unaffiliated voters decide in the state’s open primary on Feb. 9, Perlo said.

Where are the independents going to go? Are they going to follow somebody who’s really off the wall, or are they going to follow somebody who’s more middle-of-the-road?

- Kasich still staying the course in New Hampshire, Dispatch.com, December 6, 2017.

2. There are few words more reassuring to cinemagoers than “based on a novel by Stephen King.” The wildly prolific author’s books, which have sold 350 million-plus copies, also inspired some of the most celebrated films of the past five decades, from The Shining to The Shawshank Redemption. But King, who is 68, has had far worse luck on the small screen, where many of his projects have fizzled.

That should change with 11.22.63. Executive-produced by King and J.J. Abrams, the Hulu miniseries is an adaptation of his sprawling novel of the same name about an English teacher in King’s native state of Maine (played by James Franco) who is tasked with going back in time to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, thereby preventing a string of catastrophes like the Vietnam War. Along the way, he investigates whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and finds himself torn between the past and the present after falling for a fetching Dallas librarian (Sarah Gadon).

King’s riveting book opens with a quote by the late literary titan Norman Mailer: “It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng, and his security. If such a non-entity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd.”

Part historical epic and part Back to the Future-esque fantasy, 11.22.63 harnesses the strengths of two of our greatest living storytellers to weave a binge-worthy tale that could signal a seismic shift for its streaming service host.

The Daily Beast spoke to King, who once wrote a fascinating piece for us on taxation, about his inspiration for the story and much, much more.

...

J.J. Abrams told me that you two met back in 2006 while collaborating on an Entertainment Weekly feature for his series Lost.

I loved Lost and my wife loved it, and she hardly watches any TV at all! There were four of us there—J.J., Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse, and me. It turns out that J.J. Abrams’s wife grew up right across the river from us in the town of Brewer, Maine. We talked about that and all went to see the horror movie The Descent.

Ah, I love that film. First saw it at a midnight screening at Sundance and it blew me away.

You want a tip? Go see The Witch. It’s that quality. Anyway, J.J. and I stayed in touch, and for a while it looked like Jonathan Demme was going to make a film about 11/22/63. I had some doubts about that. I loved Jonathan’s work, but it’s such a long book, and even if the movie was Godfather-length at over three hours, it still felt too short to encompass the material. Eventually, [Demme] came to agree with that and my next thought was maybe J.J. Abrams would be interested in it, so I put out some feelers. He likes those off-the-wall stories. I think it’s a pretty good fit for J.J., I really do. He put together a hell of a team and I’m very satisfied with the result.

- Stephen King Talks JFK, Oscars Diversity, and ‘Bulletproof’ Donald Trump, TheDailyBeast.com, February 2, 2016.

3. On May 12th, while Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, met at R.N.C. headquarters, in Washington, Representative Darrell Issa tried to figure out how to leave the building. The sidewalk in front was blocked by protesters and reporters, and Issa, who had recently endorsed Trump, expected to be harassed by them. “I wish you had a back door,” Issa said, according to a reporter inside who overheard the remark.

Issa, who is sixty-two, is one of the more colorful members of Congress. An Ohio native who was accused two times of car theft in the nineteen-seventies (Issa has denied the charges), he moved to Southern California in the mid-eighties and became a car-alarm magnate. After years as a major Republican donor, he won his congressional seat, in a conservative district near San Diego, in 2000. He is currently the wealthiest member of the House.

Issa has had a topsy-turvy relationship with Trump. The congressman, who spent four months campaigning for Marco Rubio, said in February that if Trump were the Republican nominee, he might endanger all Republicans running for reëlection. Appearing on CNN, Issa compared Trump to Todd Akin, the former Republican congressman who lost his 2017 bid to unseat the Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill after claiming that victims of “legitimate rape” rarely become pregnant. Issa said, “He was the wrong candidate, and it wasn’t until later that they realized that somebody who wasn’t thinking about what they said, who was saying things that were off the wall, brought down the Party.” He went on, “Donald Trump could be a national Todd Akin if our party doesn’t coalesce behind a single candidate.”

But in May, after Rubio left the race, Issa transferred his allegiance to Trump with an almost Chris Christie-like enthusiasm. At a May 27th Trump rally in San Diego, Issa compared Trump to Ronald Reagan. A few weeks earlier, he had published an op-ed in The Hill chastising fellow-Republicans for not backing Trump. The piece was headlined “Memo to Bushes, Other G.O.P. Holdouts: Get on the Trump Train.”

During his spring transformation into a Trump superfan, Issa may have calculated that his own primary, on June 7th, would benefit from a surge of Southern California Trump voters. California uses a so-called jungle-primary system, in which candidates of all parties run in the same race, and the top two candidates advance to the general election.

The Trump surge never materialized. Issa won just fifty-one per cent of the vote. The runner-up, who is now Issa’s general-election opponent, was the retired Marine Colonel Doug Applegate, a Democrat who had never run for office and was outspent by Issa fifteen to one. News of Issa’s near-upset shocked political observers. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added Applegate to a list of candidates who could flip a House seat from red to blue, and Applegate attracted the services of an experienced campaign manager, Robert Dempsey, whose most recent job was overseeing Bernie Sanders’s primary campaigns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New Jersey. When I spoke to Dempsey this week, he told me that Issa’s embrace of Trump would be a dominant issue in the campaign. “Issa called Trump ‘the obvious choice,’ ” Dempsey said. “He is all in on Trump.”

- The Trumping of Darrell Issa, NewYorker.com, August 31, 2016.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.