On Pinterest recently, a board devoted to Bizarro cartoons, including a fair number relevant to this blog but not previously posted here — from which, the three below (all the work of Dan Piraro alone, without Wayno’s collaboration). Two are about parrots and crackers (the first is also an instance of the Psychiatrist cartoon meme); the third offers a groaner pun on a sexual idiom previously discussed on this blog. (I’ll start with a digression on the most common way parrots figure in cartoons, as adjuncts to pirates.)
Archive for the ‘Idioms’ Category
Two parrots and a pear tree
February 1, 2021Frequently asked questions
January 31, 2021A Roz Chast cartoon in the latest (2/1/21) New Yorker:
Questions asked often enough that they border on clichés. They’re frequently asked questions — but they’re not Frequently Asked Questions, Frequently Asked Questions being an idiomatic expression usually reduced to an alphabetic abbreviation, the noun FAQ.
Collocation restriction
January 17, 2021Today’s Ada@Home cartoon by Rob Harrell exemplifies the restriction of lexical items to specific collocations:
An old hand, and two young hands
December 17, 2020In the latest (12/21) New Yorker, two cartoons that especially caught my eye: one by a very old hand in the business, George Booth (now 94); the other by two young women (roughly 30), Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski (both of whom are writers as well as artists). The Booth is an absurd literalization of the idiom (put the) cart before the horse. The SLJ/SS is wryly funny as it stands, but gains immeasurably if you know about a particular children’s book.
No offense (intended)
October 15, 2020From the American tv series Emergency! S7 E11 “The Convention” (from 7/3/79), a tv movie following the regular series. Two women end up serving as a paramedic team together — female paramedics were a new thing at the time, only grudgingly accepted, and they were normally paired with a male partner — so a male paramedic tells them the watch commander wouldn’t approve of the women teaming up. One of the women good-naturedly but pointedly snaps back at him:
(1a) How would you like a thick lip, to go with your thick head? No offense.
With the idiomatic tag No offense — a shorter version of No offense intended — literally meaning something like ‘I intend/mean you no offense by saying this’, but almost always conveying something more complex than that.
goon squad goon squad goon squad
October 2, 2020Somewhere in the first Presidential “debate”, or its immediate surrounding net discussion, the phrase goon squad appeared and seized my attention, so that I repeated it like a mantra. I was in the grip of onomatomania
Logo of the League of Legends South African esports team Goon Squad
wazoo
September 29, 2020Today’s morning name. Briefly, from NOAD:
noun wazoo: US informal the anus. PHRASES up (or out) the wazoo US informal very much; in great quantity; to a great degree: he’s insured out the wazoo | Jack and I have got work up the wazoo already. ORIGIN 1960s: of unknown origin.
The phrases are straightforwardly idioms — the fact that they are degree adverbials is unpredictable from the meanings of the parts — though they can be varied a bit: by extension with the modifying adjective old (up/out the old/ol’ wazoo), or the with the noun ass ‘asshole’ instead of wazoo (to have problems up/out the ass); it’s likely that wazoo in these phrases is, historically, an ornamental replacement for ass in them (see below).
But wazoo, on its own, has no parts, so it can’t literally be an idiom. However, it’s restricted in its collocations — formally non-compositional, if not semantically non-compositional.