Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Passed on to me by Mike Pope, this cartoon with a complex pun:

The noun heel (the body part) and the verb heel — “(of a dog) follow closely behind its owner: these dogs are born with the instinctive urge to heel (NOAD2) — wrapped together with the idiom Achilles heel.

On the idiom, from Wikipedia:

An Achilles heel is a deadly weakness in spite of overall strength, which can actually or potentially lead to downfall. While the mythological origin refers to a physical vulnerability, idiomatic references to other attributes or qualities that can lead to downfall are common [as above].

… The use of “Achilles heel” as an expression meaning “area of weakness, vulnerable spot” dates only to 1840, with implied use in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Ireland, that vulnerable heel of the British Achilles!” from 1810 (Oxford English Dictionary).

(Note: once again, I don’t know who the cartoonist is. There’s a signature, but I can’t decipher it.)

This entry was posted on January 10, 2015 at 4:24 am and is filed under Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Puns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.