In our little world, we have a running joke about routine. We'd be easy to kidnap, one or the other of us will say to underscore the predictability of our comings and goings. The other will follow up with a quip about "The Ransom of Red Chief," a 1907 O. Henry short story about kidnappers who take a spoiled, rich kid who turns out to be so horrible that the crooks wind up paying the brat's father to take him back.

It's not the only nod to literature that finds its way into ordinary conversation.

A person who looks far younger than their chronological age will surely elicit an inevitable reference to a portrait in the attic ("A Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde, 1890).

Encountering a poorly behaved child always draws a comparison to the title character of "The Bad Seed," a 1954 psyc

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