When I read the title of this book today I had a thought, and because this month has been pretty lazy for blogging, I'm running with it.
The thought: the title implies a time that used to exist when grown adults needed to be told fairy tales in order to be dissuaded from doing things that could cause harm to themselves or society, like gambling, drinking or wearing a hat indoors.
That entire notion must've been all too much for the person who coined the phrase "the devil's tickets" when referring to playing cards. Too much to simply craft an argument about the perils of placing wagers with hard-earned money that one can't soon repay with tangible imagery from the world in which the gambler lived.
The conversation would, understandingly, lack a certain level of artistic license. "Hey, Wilfred, bro, come on, a pair of sevens, hold up. You put all that money in the pot, and you can't pay your rent for, like, a year. Your wife will leave you for another dude, and your kids will die of starvation. Fact!"
I mean, how's that gonna get the message across, right? It must have been a lot easier back in the roaring '20s to just say something like, "Dost not play this hand of poker, Wilfred. For when you do, thou art holding the Devil's Tickets! If you didn't already know, those are tickets that take you to Hell! And monsters eat you there!"
