a cigar is just a cigar

• a cigar is a cigar

From sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

a cigar is just a cigar

1. (idiomatic) The matter is simple and straightforward.
   • 1998 March, Ellen Tien, “Love Q&A”, in Elizabeth Crow, editor, Mademoiselle, New York, N.Y.: Condé Nast Publications, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 81, column 3:

     There's plenty of time for dating later on—look at Janet Reno. Okay, don’t look at Janet Reno. However, assuming that you are seeking romance (and that a cigar is just a cigar), your best bet is to warn would-be companions of potential scheduling snafus ahead of time.

   • 2005, George Stade, chapter 9, in Sex and Violence: A Love Story, New York, N.Y.: Turtle Point Press, →ISBN, page 154:

     The poem, as you see it, is like the society of the People of the Kilikang before the missionaries arrived, as I read them. That’s how you see it. But to see it that way you had to play some tricks on yourself. You had to ignore this and exaggerate that, overlook this and look beyond that, take it that a cigar is just a cigar here but that a stovepipe hat is a symbol there, rearrange widely distributed elements into a mosaic of your own aspect, for no verbal form is a ball bearing; there are always loose ends and parts that do not quite fit.

   • 2005, Stanley H. Block with Carolyn Bryant Block, “Befriending Your Identity System through Mind-Body Mapping”, in Come to Your Senses: Demystifying the Mind-Body Connection, Hillsboro, Ore.: Beyond Words Publishing, →ISBN, page 85:

     Are self-improvement ideas all futile? Are we simply being manipulated by the Identity System when we try to reach our goals or when we are listening to our bodies and feel that we need to exercise? David’s question hit the nail on the head. The purpose of bridging and mapping is to ensure that a cigar is just a cigar, i.e., that the uncomplicated need to exercise, in this case, remains pure, direct, and simple.

   • 2013, “Dream #39”, in Robert G. Kunzendorf, James W. Veatch, Envisioning the Dream through Art and Science (with 100 Digitally Imaged Dreams), Amityville, N.Y.: Baywood Publishing Company, →ISBN, “Appendix with 100 Artists’ Verbal Descriptions, Interpretations, and Digital Images of Their Own Dreams” section, page 132:

     As a child in elementary school, I was very awkward and paranoid, especially in that particular classroom. It is possible that the “demon” represented my fears of not being accepted like the fellow kids because I was different. It is also possible that “a cigar ‘is’ just a “cigar” as Freud would say.

   • 2016, Chuck Klosterman, “A Quaint and Curious Volume of (Destined-to-Be) Forgotten Lore”, in But What If We’re Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past, New York, N.Y.: Blue Rider Press, →ISBN, page 47:

     Historically awesome art always means something different from what it superficially appears to suggest—and if future readers can’t convince themselves that the ideas they’re consuming are less obvious than whatever simple logic indicates, that book will disappear. The possibility that a cigar is just a cigar doesn’t work with literary criticism, and that’s amplified by the passage of time.