"things which are supposed to mean nothing—they actually mean everything"

I've been watching Cranford––a BBC series from 2007 based on novels by Elizabeth Gaskell about unmarried genteel older women in a small-town in the mid-1800s.

Scrollery

A copy of Cranford (1853) happened to come into the thrift store, so I read it too. It's a short comic novel, and it's amusing, but I wouldn't have gotten far if I hadn't been watching the show because I can't picture much of what the ladies talk about.
They repeatedly mention their lacy caps, for instance.

Remember the fascinator Princess Beatrice wore to the wedding of her cousin Prince William to Kate Middleton in 2011––looked like a vulva re-imagined as an ornamental squid scroll on an armoire?

Stephen Jones, a British milliner, says (of fascinators): “They’re supposed to look like a caprice. Something that means nothing.  And things which are supposed to mean nothing—they actually mean everything.”
[--via Vanity Fair]

And that's Cranford, too:
Nothing much happens in the book, but you could write a PhD on the world that supports the nothing.

Lots of attention is paid to textiles, for instance––the ladies are always fussing about their caps––these widows and spinster-daughters of rectors are genteel but too poor to afford new dresses––but no interpretation of their importance is offered.
(Textiles again! Gaskell lived in Manchester--the Cotton Capital.)

An incident involving a cat and a piece of handmade lace soaking in milk (to clean it) is related.

I looked up lace & caps and read that with the industrialization of the late 1700s (in Manchester!), machines began to make excellent lace, which formerly women made at home.

"Irregularity in lace used to be the sign of an unskilled woman; in the industrial age, it became a sign that the lace was produced by a person, not a machine."

We with our visible mending and public knitting are signaling something similar--that we, some of us, value the making and taking care of things by hand.

"wordfowling with a blunderbuss"

This is not significant of something greater, but I learned something fun reading Cranford. 
I always thought malapropism--the ludicrous misuse of a word––was made-up, and it is--but its root is an old English word malapropos, from the French "mal-àpropos" (badly for the purpose")--and that's the term Gaskell uses:
Distracted, a character "made one or two very mal-àpropos answers."

Looking it up, I found a funny description of the root of malapropism from Fowler, via Eymology Online:

"When Mrs. Malaprop, in Sheridan's Rivals [1826], is said to 'deck her dull chat with hard words which she don't understand,'
she protests, 'Sure, if I reprehend anything in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, & a nice derangement of epitaphs'
—having vague memories of apprehend, vernacular, arrangement, & epithets.
She is now the matron saint of those who go wordfowling with a blunderbuss."

Things Look Like Other Things (TLLOT)

One of my favorite things is noticing the way things look like other things (TLLOT). I don't get to play this game with my coworkers much, because we don't see or know the same things.
At work, people's knowledge tends to be based on their personal experiences, not book-learning, sort of like the ladies enclosed in Cranford.
Hm. Yeah... that's true--my workplace feels to me like a small village with few books (and little use of the Internet).

Or if they have studied something, it's often just the ONE thing, in depth but not in breadth. Grateful-J, for instance, knows a ton about plants, but not, say, the history of English gardens;
and Ass't Man knows a lot of music--a lot!––but not much about music.

But... there's a new guy in furniture who shares my GFK (General Fund of Knowledge), and for the first time in five years, I can play TLLOT with a coworker!
(I call this guy Matt Damon because he looks like he could be MD's slightly-funny-looking cousin).

I was sorting toys the other day. I didn't recognize some toy figures, but I knew they were from some comic book franchise--probably Marvel, because Marvel is ascendant (and also I usually know DC's Batman and Superman characters).

I asked Matt Damon (MD) if he knew who the characters were, and he did--they were X-Men. (Yes, Marvel.)

The only X-man I know is Wolverine, I told him, because I saw the movie Logan (2017--Logan is Wolverine).

"Oh, wasn't that a good movie," MD said.

"It really was," I said. "It stands alone, you don't even have to see it as a Marvel movie." And, because MD has always gotten my references so far, I dared to add, "It reminded me of Paper Moon--have you seen that?"

OMG--he had!

 
The director of Logan, James Mangold, has said he thought of Paper Moon (also, Shane).

And then MD and I got talking about how fun it is to play leap-frog, especially when talented creators know and credit their influences.
George Lucas, for instance, said that Akira Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress inspired his first Star Wars (and Kurosawa himself said he was inspired by John Ford's Westerns).

Found this on Reddit (with links to George Lucas talking about the two films):

 So that’s been a treat at work. I'm a little unsure about MD otherwise---can't tell what he's up to or where he's coming from yet--but it is a HUGE pleasure to have someone at work to play this game with.
'Things looking like other things' may be supposed to mean nothing, but actually it means everything.

Gotta dash now--bink's taking me grocery shopping in the car. I can load up on the heavy things!