sometimes you eat the bar [b'ar ; bear]

B

bokonon

Member
Serbian, Serbia
It's a line from "The big Lebowsky" movie:

"Sometimes you eat the bar and sometimes... well, he eats you"

Could anyone please tell me what does it mean? It's probably obvious to a native speaker, but "eating the bar" or vice versa doesn't really mean anything to me :)

Much obliged,
LP
 
    • bokonon said:
    It's a line from "The big Lebowsky" movie:

    "Sometimes you eat the bar and sometimes... well, he eats you"

    Could anyone please tell me what does it mean? It's probably obvious to a native speaker, but "eating the bar" or vice versa doesn't really mean anything to me :)

    Much obliged,
    LP
    Click to expand...

    It's not obvious to me - could you add some more context?
     
    I'm guessing, just guessing, that the bar means the law firm here.
    If that's the case, then this sentence means that sometimes the law firm outsmart you, but sometimes you outsmart them.

    Just a wild guess:p
     
    Oh, good heavens. Stick me in a thread with nichec and LV4-26 and I change gears. Clunk. Terribly sorry!

    Anyway, yes, that's what I intended to say. I think it either really means, or is at least referring to, the word bear.
     
    "Bar" means "bear". Most famously in stories about the famous frontiersman Daniel Boone carving in a tree "D. Boon cilld a bar o this tre 1775" and in the theme song for the TV series "Daniel Boone" with Fess Parker.
     
    I personally don't consider it a "common" expression because I've never heard of it until now.

    To judge from the examples I found on the Web, it means, "You either win big, or you lose big".

    But to understand why it's used in that scene in that movie, you would have to view the scene. The fact that it sounds like 'bar' could just be due to a regional accent. Or it could be word play on the "bar of a bowling club" that has been mentioned, in which case it might be a self deprecating allusion to getting drunk.
     
    It might be word play in this particular case but the "normal" usage would be with "bear" and mean "Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose". I don't know the origin but it does have an early frontier feel to it.
     
    (in AE at least) we have many versions of that idiom, all meaning roughly the same thing.

    For example:
    Sometimes you're the dog, sometimes you're the tree.
    Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug.


    But there are more.
     
    I'd just like to point out the pronunciation spelling of this variant of the word bear is often b'ar. For example, Joel Chandler Harris, the author of the Uncle Remus stories, had a bear character named Brer B'ar.
     
    A quote from The Big Lebowski. "The Stranger" while sitting at a bar in a bowling alley with "The Dude." According to many on the internet (I haven't checked too carefully) the script says "Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes, he eats you." which really makes more sense than eating/being eaten by "the bar." Wouldn't that stink, if the lesson was sometimes you eat the bar (smash your face/mouth into it) and sometimes the bar eats you (takes all you've got from you, makes you way too drunk to function, or literally eats you, perhaps?). Seems like a lose-lose situation that you wouldn't expect to find in a proverb.

    Using the word "bear" it's a lot easier to understand/believe this proverb.
     
    I didn't see this thread back in January. As mnplsray says, if this is an attempt to duplicate the "folk" or "back woods" pronunciation of "bear," perhaps as part of a pun, it would have been better to spell what you sometimes eat and what sometimes eats you as "b'ar." I made the assumption that that was what was meant at the outset, but it obviously confused many.

    I don't know anything about a movie in which this line occurred.
     
    By the way, this style of pronunciation is extremely rare in modern speech. The guy in the movie was just acting, although he actually does have an accent in real life it's not as thick as the character he plays in the movie. The only well-known person who I can think of that still actually talks with such a thick accent is probably Loretta Lynn, and even then it's not all the time, but certain words really make you go "wow" with how thick the accent on the "a" sound is. You can find examples in most of her songs or interviews, but for one particular example, find a song called "You Wanna Give Me a Lift" and notice that except for context, you can't tell if she's saying "fire" or "far".
     
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    And I'd add that even "b'ar" would confuse most BE readers. Well, perhaps I should say it would confuse this one. I wouldn't guess from that spelling that "bear" was meant.
     
    That's fair enough. I am familiar with it mostly through another movie, "Davy Crocket, King of the Wild Frontier," a Walt Disney production of about 1954, actually just a combination of three half-hour or so segments of his weekly TV program. Mr. Crockett was a real frontiersman in Tennessee in the early 19th century who served a few terms in Congress and then moved to Texas, where he was killed when the Alamo was taken by assault in 1836. Many legends and tall tales were told about him. One of the lines in a song in the movie was, in a supposed backwoods frontier dialect, "Kilt [killed] himself a b'ar when he was only three." Davy Crockett and his [ra]coonskin caps were all the rage, at least among pre-teen boys, in the summer of the year in which the TV programs were broadcast and the movie ran. Disney used to rerun their movies every few years on a regular cycle, picking up a new "cohort" of children each time; I don't know whether they did that with "Davy Crockett," but if so I am sure that it never repeated its initial success.
     
    Fabulist said:
    That's fair enough. I am familiar with it mostly through another movie, "Davy Crocket, King of the Wild Frontier," a Walt Disney production of about 1954, actually just a combination of three half-hour or so segments of his weekly TV program. Mr. Crockett was a real frontiersman in Tennessee in the early 19th century who served a few terms in Congress and then moved to Texas, where he was killed when the Alamo was taken by assault in 1836. Many legends and tall tales were told about him. One of the lines in a song in the movie was, in a supposed backwoods frontier dialect, "Kilt [killed] himself a b'ar when he was only three." Davy Crockett and his [ra]coonskin caps were all the rage, at least among pre-teen boys, in the summer of the year in which the TV programs were broadcast and the movie ran. Disney used to rerun their movies every few years on a regular cycle, picking up a new "cohort" of children each time; I don't know whether they did that with "Davy Crockett," but if so I am sure that it never repeated its initial success.
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    Wow, you obviously learnt a lot about movies this is in since yesterday's comment then!:D

    Edit - oh sorry, I see you mean you don't know about movies with "bar" in. But surely, ultimately, neither "b'ar" nor "bar" occurred in a movie, they were said?
     
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    timpeac said:
    Wow, you obviously learnt a lot about movies this is in since yesterday's comment then!:D
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    No, I just never heard the "you eat the b'ar/b'ar eats you" comment in a movie. I never saw the movie that line was in and have not seen the scene outside of it, despite some poster's incredulity that anyone was not familiar with it. I don't expect everyone to be familiar with "Davy Crockett," only males who were children in the U.S. in the early 1950's.
     
    Fabulist said:
    No, I just never heard the "you eat the b'ar/b'ar eats you" comment in a movie. I never saw the movie that line was in and have not seen the scene outside of it, despite some poster's incredulity that anyone was not familiar with it. I don't expect everyone to be familiar with "Davy Crockett," only males who were children in the U.S. in the early 1950's.
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    Yes, you were quick to reply - I edited my comment since:).

    So it's the whole idiom you've never heard in a movie, rather than not hearing "b'ar"?
     
    timpeac said:
    So it's the whole idiom you've never heard in a movie, rather than not hearing "b'ar"?
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    I am sure that I have heard the saying, "Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you," but I don't associate it with any movie and I have not seen the movie in which "bar" was substituted for "bear," whether as a dialectical imitation or a pun on bear/b'ar/bar.
     
    Fabulist said:
    I am sure that I have heard the saying, "Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you," but I don't associate it with any movie
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    Yes you do - see your comment in post 22!! "I am familiar with it mostly through another movie..."
    Fabulist said:
    and I have not seen the movie in which "bar" was substituted for "bear," whether as a dialectical imitation or a pun on bear/b'ar/bar.
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    Then I guess I just don't get your earlier comment. Why would you necessarily know anything about the movie (edit a movie) it occurred in? (Despite the fact you've given a run-down on the topic above.) We can all still draw conclusions from a given usage in a given context. I don't get the impression that many people, other than the person who started the thread, know a lot about the specific movie in question.
     
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    timpeac said:
    I don't get the impression that many people, other than the person who started the thread, know a lot about the specific movie in question.
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    I would expect a significant number of Americans to know the movie, or at least know about the movie. It was quite a cult classic, and the directors are quite well known.
     
    divisortheory said:
    I would expect a significant number of Americans to know the movie, or at least know about the movie. It was quite a cult classic, and the directors are quite well known.
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    Just as a note, I don't think "cult classic" and "significant number of Americans" match up. :) I recently saw the movie and think it's for cults -- perhaps the word got out to a significant number of Americans who didn't bother going. :D
     
    Copyright said:
    Just as a note, I don't think "cult classic" and "significant number of Americans" match up. :) I recently saw the movie and think it's for cults -- perhaps the word got out to a significant number of Americans who didn't bother going. :D
    Click to expand...

    Depends on your definition of "significant"... ;) In the US, even a small percentage (say 1%) is quite a substantial number of people, more than the entire population of many other countries...
     
    As a (big) Big Lebowski fan, I was curious about the phrase and did some research. Despite the 'Stranger's' curious pronunciation, the object of eating is indeed 'the bear' I also found the phrase in baseball attributed to Elwin Charles 'Preacher' Roe (born in Arkansas, 1916) who pitched for the Cardinals, Pirates and Dodgers between 1938 and 1952. After a poor start, Roe was removed from the game in the second inning and commented "Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you". Akin to the immortal words of Ebby Calvin 'Nuke' LaLoosh inBull Durham: "Some days you win, some days you lose and some days it rains".

    Any film that inspires people to travel to festivals and dress up like the characters certainly qualifies as a cult in my books. The film barely registered in its year of release (90th $ grossing film in 1998) but has a pop culture status that extends beyond its origins. Google 'Lebowski' or 'Lebowsifest' for a taste.
     
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    Allow me to provide some insight, perhaps late but still valid. The Stranger in "The Big Lebowski" is played by character actor Sam Elliott, a classic American cowboy type. Not only does he appear in this one scene on screen, he also provides the narration for the film to give it the flavor of a tall tale. As Fabulist points out, this pronunciation of the word "bear" is a somewhat antique but completely valid dialectic. Elliott nearly always speaks in films using this dialect. Between that and his mustache, he will always have work.

    In the scene in question, we have our main character in his comfort zone - an urban California bowling alley. He's reflecting on his adventures and trying not to learn a lesson. We find Sam Elliot in full cowboy costume joining him at the bar, obviously incongruous to the setting. He listens to "The Dude" and delivers the line in question.

    I can't really say for sure if the delivery was scripted that way or if it was somewhat improvised or if it was just coincidental but that's the beauty of it. The film's protagonist is an unapologetic drunken slacker and the scene has a very "this is the moral of the film" flavor. Now, if the line is only meant to be "sometimes the bear eats you" then the moral of the story is that sometimes crazy things happen and it's through no fault of your own. On the other hand, if it's intentional that it sounds like "sometimes the b'ar eats you" (especially considering the scene takes place sitting at a bar) then the moral of the story could be that "The Dude"s lifestyle is to blame. Add to this the classic American image of a cowboy sitting at a bar drinking whiskey and you have a fantastic scene that can be discussed and interpreted forever.
     
    I don't think the scene contains any arcane reference to bar, which the cowboy would probably call a saloon, anyway. At any rate, he's drinking sarsaparilla, and he maintains that accent throughout the film.
     
    So then you would probably also say that the moral of the film is that sometimes random things happen to people and they are out of their control. Someone else might see the exact same scene and interpret the meaning of the entire film to be very different. If "The Stranger" had used the word "saloon" then the meaning of the dialog would have been clear. I assume this forum is about subtleties of language and this is a great example of one. In good films, the characters can have one intention while the film itself actually means something else. In a great film, like this one, the viewer can interpret it differently depending on their perspective. Notice that "The Stranger" only appears as a character in this one final scene. For the rest of the film, he's been an omniscient narrator. He knows the characters' entire back stories and everything that has happened to them so when he appears in person to deliver some wisdom, it's obviously significant - but it is also quite open to two diametrically opposed interpretations. How the viewer decides to see it says more about him than it does about the film.
     
    If "The Stranger" had used the word "saloon" then the meaning of the dialog would have been clear.
    Click to expand...

    There's nothing clear to me about the phrase: Sometimes you eat the saloon.

    We're moving far afield from the original question; as I said above I think "Sometimes you eat the bar" in this instance is a regional pronunciation of a fairly well-known phrase.
     
    If you'd like to hear another example of bear/bar a similar dialect, search for "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" and listen to it. It's the theme song for a Disney movie and recordings of it by four different artists were all on the top of the various record charts in 1955. The first verse is:
    Bornd on a mountaintop in Tennessee,
    Greenest state in the land of the free.
    Raised in the woods soze he knew every tree.
    Kilt him a bar when he was only three.
    Click to expand...
     
    Hmm, wouldn't expect improvisation of words or even dialect in any Coen Brothers' work - it is actively discouraged. According to Jeff Bridges, only one line in the film was improvised: (the Dude: 'You... you... human paraquat!'). J and E script every pause, space and 'um'. See also Peter Storemare's oddly scripted 'Pancakes House' in Fargo.
     
    Never heard bar used for bear when referencing Daniel Boone, the theme song to Davy Crockett, however, DID mention a bar (bear).
     
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