Easy Come, Easy Go
My favorite Las Vegas story: half-a-dozen friends of mine and I were in Las Vegas for New Year's Eve shenanigans one year. Towards the end of our stay, one of our group took his leftover gambling funds to the roulette wheel and placed it all on black 22.
For those unfamiliar with roulette, this is one of the riskiest best you can make. Roulette allows you to gamble in a number of ways, from low-level blocks of colors or numbers to high-paying single numbers. This latter is what my friend had done - by choosing black 22, he had bet that the ball would fall on the number 22 on the wheel, which would pay at about 30-1.
To all our amazement, he won, turning his small bet into $800 instantaneously. To our collective horror, he then turned to the dealer and said, "let it ride." In other words, he wanted to bet his newly won $800 that the ball would land on black 22 two times in a row.
Even the dealer tried to talk him out of it. She asked if he was sure about three times before spinning the wheel. As she shook her head and pulled all the chips to her side of the table, my friend walked away saying, "easy come, easy go."
I'm not a big fan of "easy come, easy go." It's too glib and too flippant for my taste. Especially lately, when it seems like it's used to minimize someone's effort and skill. Here's what I mean. Remember Poison's song, "Every Rose Has Its Thorn"?
In the middle verse it says:
I listen to our favorite song, playing on the radio
Hear the DJ say love's just a game of easy come, easy go
But I wonder, does he know, has he ever felt like this
And I know that you'd be here right now
If I could have let you know somehow, I guess.
Right. So, the DJ is saying that love is a good example of easy come, easy go but the protagonist of the song rejects this, thinking that if the DJ had really ever been in love, he'd never be able to be so cavalier about it. I get that.
There's nothing worse than putting in a lot of effort (emotional, intellectual, whatever) only for it to not be enough. Then, to have someone else, someone who doesn't know and possibly can't know, just what your effort cost you, try to dismiss it all as easy come easy go is just insulting. Worse yet, we do the dismissing ourselves. Either because we don't want to show how much pain we're in or how much the effort has cost us, we declare easy come, easy go almost the same way we say c'est la vie - there's nothing more to be done. It is what it is.
Something else interesting, if you look at the Wikipedia disambiguation page for all the different songs and movies and books named Easy Come, Easy Go (and their list is far from complete) - from the 1930s through the 1960s, you see a lot more use of easy come, easy go as synonymous with carefree and easygoing. You start to see the more modern spin on it in the 1970s, although there are certainly cases of it being more c'est la vie before that.
But, anyway. When people tell us easy come, easy go, it's usually not meant to be insulting or belittling, it's more that someone wants to move the conversation along, either because they're tired of hearing about it, or because they don't know what else to do. Maybe remember that the next time someone tells you what they've lost.
Origin(s):
If the Committee to Ascribe a Naval Origin to Everything doesn't actually exist, it should and if it does, then it should have as a counter-part the Committee to Ascribe an Ancient Chinese Proverb as Origin to Everything, as Writing Explained does with Easy Come, Easy Go. Actual dictionaries, though, don’t make any claims as such.
From Cambridge:
said when something, especially money, is easily got and then soon spent or lost
From Collins-Cobuild:
You use easy come, easy go to indicate that the person you are talking about does not care much about money and possessions.
Notable Events of 1988:
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Silence:
I write Learned from the middle-of-nowhere, Japan. As I write this week’s edition, Japan feels like a different place. Between schools closing and event after even being cancelled, for once it feels like there’s nothing wrong with staying in and doing absolutely nothing because no one wants you to be outside interacting with the public. With that in mind, here are my current (highly recommended) distractions:
Next time: Eponymous. That's it. Stay strong, stay curious. Learn something.