Let's be Frank...

Maybe I have too much free time. Or maybe I'm just a curious person. Or maybe I ask stupid yet intriguing questions. But sometimes I wonder about a lot of things that I kinda think most people don't ever wonder about.

For example... Think about the expression, "Let's be Frank." Which means, you know, "Be brutally honest."

Or think about "Negative Nancy." Poor Nancy, always such a downer. Kinda like Debbie. "Debbie downer."

In Spanish they've got a good one, which is "La Hilaria." Everyone is either older, meaner or more fucked up than her. She forms part of every expression you could ever invent in Spanish. She's worse off than everyone in absolutely any situation. When I'm ill, Pelayo would sometimes say, "Ohh that sucks, you're sicker than La Hilaria." Or when I'm drunk, "You're more drunk than La Hilaria!" She's like the default Nancy and Debbie, and absolutely everyone else on the planet is worse off than her. I once dedicated a whole week to asking everyone I know in Oviedo who this terribly off lady was. No idea. Just like Frank and Nancy.

So, my big question is this. Who are these people? Who was the first Frank to be so "frank" to get that expression named after him? Was there some dude in some small town who was at the Main Street bar being brutally honest to everyone around him all day every day? And was he just so "frank" that everyone just replaced the word brutally honest with his name? He must have been really frank, I guess. Frank enough to get his name around, that's for sure.

I also tend to wonder about other weird tendencies and where they started. Like silly, waste of time card games. Who invented that game "Bullshit"? And who decided it was fun enough to teach all of their friends and all their families the same card game enough so that when you meet someone from Ohio they also know how to play it? Really?

Or jokes. I know the internet spreads jokes and people might read them online and repeat them to their friends at the bar later, but generally jokes are a social thing passed by word of mouth. Who in the world invented the "Why did the chicken cross the road?" joke and whyyyy did it go so far? How many people lie about knowing the person who invented that joke? Or even about being that person?

So many questions...

Okay, of all these questions the most important one is Frank. I want to know who he is. There is no reward involved but if you hear of any news, I wanna know. No, I gotta know. It's keeping me awake at night.