Archive for the ‘Idioms’ Category
November 11, 2025
Very briefly noted, this morning’s morning name, the stock insult in French:
parler français comme une vache espagnole, literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’, conveying ‘to speak French badly’
I heard this first from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and our good friend Benita Bendon Campbell, It’s vivid and silly, and then English like a Spanish cow can be adapted as a critique of someone’s linguistic abilities in French or English or, I assume, any language. Cows being linguistically quite limited, and Spaniards being one of the nationalities French people are inclined to mock (though I would have expected the cow to be Italian, Dutch, or German; or of some exotic despised nationality, like Turkish or Chinese).
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Posted in Etymology, Formulaic language, French, Idioms, Insults, Morning names, Pragmatics, Stock expressions | 2 Comments »
August 21, 2025
The song, from the 1975 musical Chicago, which has been in my head constantly the past couple of days, thanks to my coming across a vein of brief retro-choreography performances of it by the dance pair Twinsauce. Just delightful, even more so when you see them doing their shtick (infused with energy and enthusiasm) in a wild variety of settings (and in an assortment of costumes): for example, in a pouring rainstorm in NYC (video here), on the snowy sidewalks of Chicago (video here), in a shoe store (with beautiful wood flooring) (video here), and in a cobblestoned passageway, as Rat and Mouse (video here).
(#1) Rat and Mouse hoofing “All That Jazz”; great fun
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Posted in Dance, Dancers, Idioms, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Music, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
January 28, 2025
Returning to a very old topic on this blog, making small advances on some outstanding puzzles. It starts with my 6/8/11 posting (yes, 14 years ago) “Parasites and the body politic”, about
my dismayed reaction to recent political assaults on teachers (and, more generally, public employees) as drains on the economy, selfishly demanding decent wages and benefits while being “unproductive”, producing nothing of significance. Lots of things are going on at once here — contempt for the working classes and for service workers like maids, cooks, gardeners, and janitors (and, yes, teachers); classic American anti-intellectualism (cue Richard Hofstadter); marketplace valuation of people’s worth; and more — but parallel attitudes surface in the way many people view academics, so it hits close to home for me.
Then the anecdote. Some years ago I was at some large public function involving people of money and substance and, wine glass in hand, struck up a conversation with another attendee. This guy plunged right in by asking me what I do [for a living]. (In many cultures, the leading question would be some version of “Where are you from?”, meaning “Who are your people?”, but in ours it has to do with occupation. All such questions are designed to position a stranger socially.)
I said I was a university professor, and, without waiting to identify himself occupationally, he said
Artists and scholars are parasites on the body politic. [call this State Suckers, SS for short]
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Posted in Academic life, Formulaic language, Idioms, Insults, Language and politics, My life, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »
November 28, 2024
(Not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Ok, one more little posting before I tackle writing about the last week in my life, parts of which were spectacularly awful, but through most of which I coped admirably and in good spirits, I don’t know why or how. This simultaneously disastrous and miraculous week ended with my delicious Thanksgiving dinner, of Korean soy and black vinegar chicken on japchae, a last-minute replacement for the long-planned Mexican homestyle pozole, which had to be shelved when the cook was incapacitated. Details to come.
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Posted in Gay porn, Idioms, Language of sex, Language play, My life, Puns | 1 Comment »
September 25, 2024
In e-mail on 9/24 from Masayoshi Yamada, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, Shimane University (author of, inter alia: A Dictionary of Trade Names and A Dictionary of English Taboo and Euphemism), substantially edited:
Recently, I happened to read the newspaper comic strip Zits; on September 23 and 24, the main character Jeremy uses the expression “I had the radish”. One of the few dictionaries which defines it:
have had the radish ‘to be no longer functional or useful; to be dead or about to perish’. Local to the state of Vermont. Primarily heard in US. (Farlex Dictionary of Idioms, 2024) (Free Dictionary link)
However, I don’t have any clue to its etymology: why radish? And is it so local to Vermont? I have no idea which language source the Farlex Dictionary is based on. [AZ: It cites the Free Dictionary, which aggregates information from many sources, so that’s not especially helpful.]
I pointed out to MY that in the strip, Jeremy decides to just invent (make up) some expression, to see if he can get it accepted. And picks had the radish. Presumably in the belief that no one had ever used it as an idiom. The first three strips (in strips to come, Jeremy eventually concedes that his idiom has had the radish):
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Posted in Catchphrases, Dialects, Formulaic language, Idioms, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Slang | 6 Comments »
September 4, 2024
In this morning’s comics feed, two linguistic jokes from the Roman Empire (in a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro); maybe it’s just something in the air, but on the other hand, September 4th, 476, marks the end of the Western Roman Empire as a political entity and consequently (in some people’s view) the beginning of the Middle Ages. So let’s say goodbye to the boy emperor Romulus, aka Augustulus, and antiquity; and hello to the barbarians and, oh yes, medieval times!
Bye-bye, Imperial times
Took Romulus to the border, to see the Empire die
I’ll get to Augustulus in a while. But first the cartoons.
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Posted in Gesture, History, Holidays, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Opposition, Plays, Puns, Semantics, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
September 2, 2024
In today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange, the clams are tenting tonight on the old campground, but find today’s experience to be unaccountably joyless; for some reason, the formulas just aren’t working:
To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize two similarity-based formulaic expressions of English: the metaphor happy camper and the simile happy as a clam; yet neither is overt in the cartoon, though both are alluded to indirectly (we’re campers and we’re clams)
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Posted in Figures of speech, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Simile, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
