"sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" meaning in English

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Phrase

Etymology: Frequently attributed to Sigmund Freud, whose theories of psychoanalysis and psychosexuality often explained various human behaviors in terms of sexual desires, and thus a cigar could be imagined as a phallic symbol indicating some inner trait of the person smoking it. This phrase reverses this concept, admitting that sometimes the cigar really is just a cigar, and that not everything is always so deep as it could be made out to be. The medical journal Psychiatry cited in an issue from 1950 that this "famous" quote was uttered by Freud 30 years earlier, although neither any written records from Freud himself, nor especial widespread use from that time period before 1950, could be found. Alan C. Elms explains this attribution as most likely apocryphal, although the origin of the phrase in psychoanalysis is still possible: Eric Hiller in 1922 published a psychoanalytic article suggesting that cigars indeed have a phallic symbolism, so this term's coinage as ironic phrase making light of this claim remains a possible origin. Head templates: {{head|en|phrase}} sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
  1. (idiomatic) Sometimes a matter is simpler than one imagines it to be. Wikipedia link: Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis Tags: idiomatic
    Sense id: en-sometimes_a_cigar_is_just_a_cigar-en-phrase-5lmW-VhM Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Download JSON data for sometimes a cigar is just a cigar meaning in English (1.9kB)

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  "etymology_text": "Frequently attributed to Sigmund Freud, whose theories of psychoanalysis and psychosexuality often explained various human behaviors in terms of sexual desires, and thus a cigar could be imagined as a phallic symbol indicating some inner trait of the person smoking it.\nThis phrase reverses this concept, admitting that sometimes the cigar really is just a cigar, and that not everything is always so deep as it could be made out to be.\nThe medical journal Psychiatry cited in an issue from 1950 that this \"famous\" quote was uttered by Freud 30 years earlier, although neither any written records from Freud himself, nor especial widespread use from that time period before 1950, could be found. Alan C. Elms explains this attribution as most likely apocryphal, although the origin of the phrase in psychoanalysis is still possible: Eric Hiller in 1922 published a psychoanalytic article suggesting that cigars indeed have a phallic symbolism, so this term's coinage as ironic phrase making light of this claim remains a possible origin.",
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{
  "etymology_text": "Frequently attributed to Sigmund Freud, whose theories of psychoanalysis and psychosexuality often explained various human behaviors in terms of sexual desires, and thus a cigar could be imagined as a phallic symbol indicating some inner trait of the person smoking it.\nThis phrase reverses this concept, admitting that sometimes the cigar really is just a cigar, and that not everything is always so deep as it could be made out to be.\nThe medical journal Psychiatry cited in an issue from 1950 that this \"famous\" quote was uttered by Freud 30 years earlier, although neither any written records from Freud himself, nor especial widespread use from that time period before 1950, could be found. Alan C. Elms explains this attribution as most likely apocryphal, although the origin of the phrase in psychoanalysis is still possible: Eric Hiller in 1922 published a psychoanalytic article suggesting that cigars indeed have a phallic symbolism, so this term's coinage as ironic phrase making light of this claim remains a possible origin.",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.