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It’s been a slice
Today’s Zits: (#1) It’s been a slice, as a way of saying ‘it’s been good; goodbye’, was new to me. It’s in a few recent dictionaries of American slang / idioms, but not in Green’s Dictionary of Slang...
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Turn-ons
Today’s Zits: The strip embodies the popular idea that males are easily aroused, by almost anything, while females require very specific triggers. And it plays on the ambiguity of the V + Prt idioms...
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Taking idioms seriously
Cartoon Thursday continues with today’s Mother Goose and Grimm: Mother Goose wants Grimm not to reveal a secret, not to let the cat out of the bag. Grimm agrees that he won’t let the cat, Attila, out...
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As the car drives
Yesterday’s Bizarro, with a play on as the crow flies: As the car drives — on roads that follow complex and twisted routes. From Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words of 6/4/11, after considering an...
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take it as a given
In today’s Pearls Before Swine, Pig misunderstands yet another English expression: Ok, it’s take it as a given ‘assume that it is true’, a partly transparent idiom. Which Pig apparently hadn’t heard...
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be toast
From Gail Collins’s NYT op-ed column on the 18th, “The Cheney in Waiting”: So what do you think Wyoming wants? Somebody younger? [Liz] Cheney is 46, and apparently planning on suggesting — in the most...
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man up!
Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine: Another demonstration of Pig’s ineptitude in using English. Possibly Pig just doesn’t know the idiom. In any case, Man up! is an odd way to communicate ‘There’s a...
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Almost-lost words
From Walt Slocombe in yesterday’s mail: I saw (on another blog that I cannot now find again) a piece on word combinations that include a word originally in general usage that has come to be barely used...
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on the fritz
A while back, when Ned Deily was visiting me, my iTunes produced an album of Joshua Bell playing Fritz Kreisler violin music, and Ned joked about my computer being on the fritz — and we both wondered...
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as good as
A little while ago, I reflected on the idiom as good as in things like He as good as called me a liar. They’re as good as dead. (where goodness doesn’t figure in the matter at all). The idiom is...
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clean someone’s clock
In today’s Pearls Before Swine, Pig continues to struggle with idioms: Michael Quinion was on the case back in 2007. Both clean ‘thrash’ and clock ‘face’ are involved. From World Wide Words on 6/9/07:...
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expecting
In today’s Pearls Before Swine, Pig once again fails to recognize idiomaticity, but this time he does it in steps: Pig first treats expect as taking an infinitival complement, as in They’re expecting...
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kick-ass news
From Ben Zimmer, two instances of ass-avoidance in the news. First, from the New York Times, a story about GoDaddy shifting its advertising strategy, “GoDaddy Steps Away From the Jiggle” by Stuart...
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Ruthie v. English
A set of One Big Happy strips in which little Ruthie confronts the language: a spectacular mondegreen, some other misunderstandings based on phonological similarity (with more familiar words replacing...
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to clean up well/nicely
Caught in passing in a posting of mine on AZBlogX about porn actor Boomer Banks (I am not making this name up), who’s notable (at least) for his very long and thick cock (illustrated in my posting),...
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getting pelvic
Heard on an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an instance of get pelvic (with someone) ‘have sex (with someone)’, a euphemistic idiom based on the image of the pelvis as the cradle of the genitals....
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Up Your Alley
Posting about the Folsom Street Fair yesterday reminded me of another BDSM street fair in San Francisco. From the fair’s website: Up Your Alley® is an unrivaled fetish fair, always on the last weekend...
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Today’s fine eggcorn
From the (Palo Alto) Daily News of October 4th, this letter from Tejinder Uberoi of Los Altos: Unconcerned that the nation is going to hell in a hen basket, the tired old men of the Republican Party...
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Sunday puns
Today’s Pearls Before Swine: Stephan Pastis rolls with the pun (on the idiom/proverb to kill two birds with one stone), and Rat upbraids him (as usual). Rat also produces another pun, on “Goodbye, Ruby...
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dirty tricks
In Sunday’s NYT Magazine, an interview by Amy Chozick, “Terry Lenzner on Tricky Dick and Dirty Tricks”, that made me think about the expression dirty tricks, which (surprise to me) seems to be only...
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