It’s astounding how we use expressions without realizing where they come from. At parties, it’s easy to impress others by attributing whatever quotation we use to either of two sources. It’s likely you’ll be right much of the time if you invoke 1) the Bible, or 2) Shakespeare.

You’ve heard people insist “Well, it’s sure to be in the Bible; the Bible’s such a big book, after all.” But nothing or nobody is cited more often than Shakespeare.

Let me explain:

The funniest cartoon I’ve ever read — one what doesn’t begin with, “A skeleton walks into a bar and says, ‘I’ll have a beer . . . and a mop,’” — consists of very few words. In this cartoon, a man inside a hidden prompting box on the stage of a famous playhouse whispers to the solo actor in Elizabethan garb: “. . . or not to be.” That is the question.

And the best quip I’ve heard deals with those whose fortune has come easily:

“He was born on third base but he thinks he’s hit a triple.”

The Shakespeare prompt ranks alongside some of the more famous, terse quotations throughout the ages, including: 

“To be or not to be” — Shakespeare;

“To be is to do” — Socrates;

“To do is to be” — Jean-Paul Sartre; … and the one we’re most familiar

with:

“Do be do be do” — Sinatra.

But back to Shakespeare:

Often, with little relevance to the meaning communicated in the play, people invoke lines from Hamlet, as in, “Frailty, thy name is woman”; “Get thee to a nunnery”; “To thine own self be true”; “The play’s the thing”; “Good night, sweet prince”; “There’s the rub”; “Conscience does make cowards of us all”; “Neither a lender nor a borrower be”; “The rest is silence” and “Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Even some terse dialogue amazes people. For example, after the Prince of Denmark runs his sword through Polonius, the king soon after asks about Polonius’s whereabouts. Hamlet’s answer: “At supper.” Not where Polonius eats, “but where he is eaten. By worms.” Yet, the prince is never charged with the crime of “Polonius assault.”

Some say that each time they re-read Shakespeare, “It’s like reading an entirely new play.”

Scenes, actions, connections, consequences and nuances that went unnoticed the first time show up the next. And as a fan of Shakespeare (we toured the castle to which Hamlet referred in the play and which served as the setting for a recent filming of “Hamlet”), I remain addicted.

My impression as a high school reader of the Bard’s works was in the over-emphasis on the plot. We were drilled on “What happened first? Then what happened? And how did the play end?” I don’t believe we were challenged to “taste” the play, and were thus unable to see the forest for the trees, or the play for the scenes.

Recently in a local bookstore, I came across a copy of “Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet.” The format of this book piqued my curiosity. It retains the original plot, about a young man obsessed with getting vengeance on his uncle, who married Hamlet’s mother after the two apparently conspired to murder Hamlet’s father.

The Manga version sets the scene in the year 2107, adorns the cast in space-age costumes and occasionally shows a character wearing an iPod-type ear bud.

The jazzy version includes all the memorable quotations, but they represent merely a host of sequential panels, hardly indicative of the Shakespeare canon.

Now, everybody remembers Classic Comics, the 25-cent booklets we’d skim in lieu of reading the full version of “Gulliver’s Travels” in high school.

Though much simplified, Classic Comics contain enough character development to give the tale context and provide a sense of what made up the characters.

So, often we could show up at Immaculate Conception School and say with a straight face, “Yes, Sister Mary Nachtmusik, I read all of ‘Ivanhoe.’” In spite of its expertly illustrated characters, the Manga version merely attaches speech balloons to them without providing background. The “to be or not to be” soliloquy of Hamlet, for example, gets grossly truncated in this version. The extreme condensation might simplify and speed up the reading, but it also removes much of what gives the play substance.

A former Highlands colleague, well-versed in matters of the Bard, agrees that if she hadn’t already been familiar with the full version of “Hamlet,” reading the Manga rendition would do little to familiarize her with the play.    

And let us hope technology doesn’t facilitate the creation of too many more eviscerated classics, distilled to the point of vacuity.

The next thing you know, “Hamlet” will appear in a version of the “flip books” of old, which created the sensation of movement by quickly riffling through the pages, the way one would shuffle cards.

Remember those?

• • •

“In the Iraqi culture, it’s considered disrespectful to throw a shoe at someone.”

We heard that pronouncement many times after an Iraqi journalist threw shoes at George W. Bush, which the president ducked. We wonder: In which culture is such an act considered respectful? And are we perhaps talking about Nerf shoes here?

• • •

As soon as I received the new license sticker for my car, I dropped it, along with the registration, down the driver’s side window and into the inner workings of the car. I tried to retrieve it by raising and lowering the offending window, but all I got was a grinding sound which proved the car also has a built-in paper shredder.

Convinced I was the only person on the planet to have lost my license sticker, I almost panicked, expecting delays, penalties and excessive paperwork.

I phoned Vanee Lujan, manager of the local motor vehicle division, who assured me that for five bucks I could have the sticker replaced.

Though I was No. 14 in line at the MVD, my wait was only eight minutes, and the transaction — handled expertly by a clerk named April Valencia — took three minutes.

I’m impressed!