Sayings or statements that don't make sense (2 Viewers)

[Rex Bachmann]

Ken Chan wrote (post #17):


That's wholly beside the point! Electronic media spread lots of things around. Some things "catch on" and some things don't. Now, why would that be? I would look to the cultural prestige---or in this case, a sort of "anti-prestige"---of the originators (the "coolness" factor). That would hold both in pre- and post-electronic ages.

It's an issue not of how a meme (a cultural behavior, practice, or belief) gets disseminated, but why it "sticks" or "catches on" with the populace. This is a social, not a technological issue.[/SIZE]

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Alf S wrote (post#51):


For those who get so exercised over the word ordering in the various versions of this saying, it would "make more sense" to look at the historical meaning of the verb have. I believe the saying preserves the older, literal meaning of that verb, which is also found in the (now discarded?) phrase of the marriage oath "to have and to hold". If that interpretation is correct, have would have meant 'to hold (in one's hand/grasp)'. Obviously, if cake (or any portion thereof) is in your mouth, it can't also simultaneously be in your hand or grasp. Seen in this light, it doesn't matter a whit which order you state the elements in, the meaning of the phrase is the same; hence, the variations.

And, by the way, "common sense" has little to do with most of these sayings, most especially due to their metaphoric nature.

 

[andrew markworthy]

With respect, you appear to contradict yourself. Most phrases have a common sense beginning, which time has made appear nonsensical due to declining familiarity of the references (e.g. 'shut your face' referring to closing a helmet visor) or changing use of words (e.g. 'proof of the pudding is in the eating' relies on understanding 'proof' was once more commonly used as a synonym of 'test').

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Note expressions:

nuts
batty
bats in the belfry
toys in the attic
crackers
bonkers
to go to pieces
(to go) bananas
to crack up

These expressions point to an underlying cultural ideology that associates distorted states of mind with fragmentation into large numbers of small items. Your example's application to "fruitcake" seems a natural extension of the cultural idiom.

As an example of the enrichment of the language through multiple and sometimes metaphoric expression, I give the audience these to ponder

to pass on/away
to depart (this mortal coil)
to bite the dust (ritual activity?)
to kick the bucket (ritual activity?)
to buy the farm (past tense only)
to meet one's maker
to give up the ghost
to push up daisies (used only in the progressive aspect to denote a state of being)

Other idioms of interest that may or may not have had "practical" origins. (It's your call.)

to break wind
to cut the cheese

 

[BrianW]

"Clean as a whistle?"

Yuck!

 

[Rex Bachmann]

BrianW wrote (post #85):



Quote:



"clean as a whistle?"





According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), an obsolete meaning of clean is 'clear in sound or tone', which this expression would seem to preserve. Again, evidence that such expressions (here, a folk-simile) may preserve linguistic archaisms.

John Watson wrote (post #60):


Quote:



I wonder if "bodkins" may have anything to do with "body" as in the olde expression, "what's a body to do"





There are two words bodkin, one of which is a modified form of bodikin, which is an old diminutive derivation of body (cf. lambkin 'little lamb', babykin(s) 'little baby').

cf. OED:


Quote:



bodkin 'a diminutive body'

2. (God's, ods) bodikins! bodkins! (bodlikins!) God's dear body!: an oath. Cf. BODY n.4.






Malcolm R wrote (post #4):


Quote:



"Neat as a pin." (??)





Uh, that's "neat as a pen"!


Rob Gillespie wrote (post #18):


Quote:



"And Bob's your uncle"

Quite a popular one this side of the pond. It means to get a result






'To get a successful result without a great deal of effort', from the looks of it.

Piece o' cake or easy as pie in Americanese. The former of these, at least, points to the cakewalk, a dance contest held among American slaves, the prize for winning which was---you guessed it---a piece of cake.


Andrew Markworthy wrote (post #48):



Quote:



Welsh rabbit . . . . The joke was that the Welsh were too poor even to have rabbit (the lowliest form of meat) and thus were reduced to eating cheese and bread (i.e. akin to the 'Mexican breakfast'.





I lay no claim to expertise in British dialects or local history, but the "joke", as you call it, sounds exactly like a folk-etymology to me, a popular, or "folksy", afterthought explanation of the designation of an existing social phenomenon.


Quote:



'Rarebit' is simply an alternative, probably based on English phonetic represention of the Welsh pronunciation of 'rabbit'.





[Hmmmmm], I don't know. I don't trust the "folk explanation" ("joke") and, so, I find a more likely scenario rarebit ====> rabbit. Many British dialects are what are called [r]-dropping dialects, that is, the [r]-sound is dropped when it immediately follows a vowel-sound and immediately precedes another consonant, or before a word boundary, with a compensatory lengthening of that vowel or greater off-glide formation. So, for instance, words like far, fire, ordinary, spur come to sound something like fah, fayuh, ohdn'ri, and sprh (hard to render online), respectively.

The outcome of such a process on an original rarebit should have been a form that, if it wasn't outright homopnonous (an exact sound-alike), at least assonated with [raebIt]. That means that the consonants of the word are all the same and follow in the same relative sequence, but the stressed (or maybe even all of the) vowels of same differ. Note the following assonant sets of words:

c ar
core
cure
care

ban
bane
bean
been
bin
bone
boon


packet
picket
pocket

(as well as phrases like "pack it!", "peck it!", "pique it!", "pick it!", "poke it!", "puke it!").

Once you've attained an assonant pair, it's simple to imagine a punning substitution [raebIt] (the animal's designation) for [ra(e)-bIt] (the presumed output of the [r]-dropping rule on an original [raerbIt]). This, of course, assumes that Welsh dialects of English partake of the same or a similar [r]-dropping rule with compensatory lengthening of preceding vowel that SBE (standard British English) does. (The precise phonetics of these dialects you, of course, should know way better than I.) So, although it may or may not be correct, this hypothesis works a lot better than saying things happen "somehow", given the present gaps in our knowledge of the crucial facts. There are linguistic mechanisms at work in all these historical language developments and those mechanisms do, in fact, interact with social forces (cultural beliefs and practices, politics, technological innovations, etc.)

In general, these things things don't "just happen somehow". We often don't know why things come about and/or become what they are, because of our human limitations. Hunting up the reasons they happen---that is, the processes of their origin and development---is the fun part of human and social "sciences".

 

[Andrew_A_Paul]

Whole bunch of Carlin stuff:

Legally drunk... Well if its legal, whats the f*#ckin problem

Lock em up and throw away the key.... where ya gonna throw it? out in front of the jail?...HIS FRIENDS WILL FIND IT!!

He really takes the cake.... Takes it where?

More than happy.... How can you be more than happy?

 

[BrianW]

Thanks, Rex. I take it, then, that "clean as a whistle" is more like "clear as a bell," and not at all like the way I've always heard it used in relation to how sanitary something is.

That actually makes sense.

 

[Yee-Ming]

Waaaaa, "catch no ball".

Which is a local saying, directly translated from the local vernacular (hence it's grammatically unsound).

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Andrew Markworthy wrote (post #76):


What the heck does that mean? It's very hard to tell by how much you're jesting. These are, in fact, examples of a highly complex system of faunal classification, and are what sociolinguists and anthropological linguists call cryptotypes, cultural categories without overt designation. Such are the following:

a school of fish
a gaggle of geese
a pride of lions
a murder of crows (look herehttp://www.backyardnature.net/n/04/040222.htm for another attempt at etymology (crows and ravens as psychopomps), and note the expression denoting ritual expiation: to eat crow.)

They are often called terms of venery (hunting), but a short survey of the language shows this kind of designation extends also to human groups:


a bevy of beauties
a coven of witches
a den of thieves (may not belong)
a [fill-in-the-blank] of humans(?????)

See further:

Wikipedia's lists of so-called "collective nouns"
crow and raven myths
Why a "murder of crows"?
more bird-classification lists
still more here
other group terms
English animal "classifiers" in general.


A book, which I have never seen, but one that's said to be excellent on the subject, is An Exaltation of Larks: The Ultimate Edition (Penguin USA, 1993), by James Lipton.


addendum to the list in post #84:

to lose one's marbles
to be five cards short of a full deck (This one has many variations in number and objects.)


addendum to post #86:

I neglected to point out that the older meaning of have is closer to that of its Latin cognate (related form descended from the same root in a putative ancestral language), capere 'to take, seize, grasp', which makes the previously expounded scenario even more likely.

And, since this is a thread on sayings, I'll take this opportunity to correct an oft repeated error: "Seize the day!" is commonly taken to be a translation of the Roman adage carpe diem, but is, in fact, no such thing. Some people have confused Latin capere 'to take, seize' with Latin carpere 'to pluck'. carpe diem means 'pluck the day!', not 'seize the day!' It means that one should consume everything in sight and abandon all cares and hope for the future; live each moment as if it were one's last, much as one would "pluck" all the petals from a flower, leaving it bare and useless. Some English-speakers (Americans?) somewhere along the way got the two verbs confused and the translation wrong. And the masses followed suit blindly.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Andrew_A_Paul wrote (post #87):



The Carlin joke is based upon homonymy punning, which is to say he's using a different meaning of take 'convey', while normally the expression is "That ( = some action) takes (i.e., receives) the cake (originally, as prize in the cakewalk-contest)', i.e., it exceeds all other similar actions. See post #86, if you haven't.

 

[Rollie]

As stated before...You've got your work cut out for you!

If your work has been cut out, then you have no work. Go home! I understand the sweatshop explanation, but that doesn't make the expression any better.

 

[Philip_G]

-lewis black

 

[Malcolm R]

 

[Rob Gardiner]

A man in control of his own destiny

 

[Mitch Stevens]

Pushing The Envelope

I must admit, I hate this expression. It gets my mind wandering. Whenever I pay monthly bills, (ie. Water Bill, Electricity, etc) I always fill out the envelopes on my kitchen table.

That said, whenever I hear someone say that a movie, or whatever, is "pushing the envelope," I literally imagine someone pushing an envelope off a table. After all, where would an envelope go, if not on a table? I mean, you don't see floating envelopes, do you?

 

[Philip_G]

Well, look at the alternate definition of envelope

 

[andrew markworthy]

 

[MarkHastings]

I always thought 'envelope' refered to wave forms, where "pushing the envelope" meant you were making more envelopes (i.e. higher frequencies) or just going faster in general.

 

[Stevan Lay]

• "Raining like cats & dogs"

Anyone know the origin of this saying?

I've seen it shower down with frogs in Magnolia but I just cannot imagine it with cats & dogs