Somedays, I just don’t know what to write about here in Blogtown.
Lately, it seems to be happening more often than not. I wonder what people might “like” to read about. And I scrap all sorts of ideas, thinking they aren’t interesting enough.
Many times, the topics seem rather mundane and flat. And I think, “C’mon, Polly. Find something. Pull out all the stops.”
The next minute, I wonder what I just said to myself.
This thing. “Pull out all the stops.”
I know what it means. It means that I want to make a very great attempt to achieve something. To make every possible effort or use all available resources to achieve an end.
But where in the heck did it come from?
As it turns out, “to pull out all the stops” comes from pipe organs.
A little tutorial on pipe organs, not that I know anything about them. I’m just regurgitating information here. I can’t even play a blade of grass, let alone some monstrous instrument like the one in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.
Anyway, those stops, and pulling them out. Here it goes.
The “stops” in this instance originally refer to the stop knobs on a pipe organ. Those knobs are used to regulate the instrument’s sound. Those little knobs do this by selecting which sets of pipes are active at a given time.
To begin all this.
Each pipe plays a note.
And the organ’s pipes are arranged in sets, which are called ranks. (They are arranged, by the way, according to type and quality of sound.)
Okay. So. An organ might have ten ranks, or it might have 100 ranks. Depending on the size. From there? Each rank will have a pipe for each note of the keyboard. Whew. A pipe for each note of the keyboard. That’s a lot of pipes.
Here is where the knobs come in. The stop knobs control which ranks will have airflow. The ranks need air to make a sound.
Now this is where it gets a little woozy for me. “A pedal plays all of the pipes for that note in whatever ranks have been selected by the organist pulling out or pushing in of one or more stop knobs.” And the band played on.
So. To pull out all the stops literally means to pull out every knob so that air is allowed to blast through every rank as the organist plays. And by pulling out all the stops, we get the biggest, most powerful blast of sound.
Ta. Da. “To make every effort to achieve something great.” Pulling out all the stops.
So that is what I’ll try to do the next time I write this blog.
Pull out all the stops.
As we all know, I can be full of hot air.
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“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
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“Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.”
― George Bernard Shaw
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“You were born with potential.
You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness.
You were born with wings.
You are not meant for crawling, so don’t.
You have wings.
Learn to use them and fly.”
― Rumi
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Pipe organs giving it their all. And me too.
