Common, but not completely clear.
A Google search tells us that the phrase "you can't get there from here"
shows up on the web about 26,000 times. Its origin isn't fully clear, but it seems
that the American comic poet Ogden Nash first used it as the title of a book of
poems in the mid 1950s. (About 700 of those 26,000 hits also mention Nash - many
simply noting that he wrote a book by that name.) Since then, and perhaps before
then as well, it's been a phrase that hints at a fundamental incongruity in the
way the world works. Even if a bus doesn't run from where we're presently at to
where we want to go, certainly we can catch a bus (or walk, or something else)
to where we can get the bus we need. Even if some things are impossible,
not being able to get there from here sounds fundamentally wrong. And yet for
some reason, and from too much experience, it seems to make sense.
Go to: Templates from hell.