Reading an online article, I was pulled up short by a strange phrase. I kid you not, it took me a whole minute to figure this out:
“Gottschalk was the only composer the nineteenth century managed to invent who was at once a grassroots American and a ground-floor Roman tic.”
Wait, what? Do people in Rome move spasmodically? Oh yes, come to think of it. I started shaking my curved fingers under my chin, like a voluble Italian. That’s a genuine Roman tic.
Gee. If they closed up the gap, he could be ground-floor Romantic. But that’s too much to hope for.
Yes, as they say in England:
“Mind the gap.”
My father made fun of my Roman tic once.
Once.
Paul Coker once drew a cartoon of a Roman tick for Mad magazine. It had on a little crested helmet and everything.
“Gottschalk was the only composer the nineteenth century managed to invent who was at once a grassroots American and a ground-floor Roman tic.”
I’m having trouble parsing this sentence. The century invented someone? A person is a tic?
Not gonna lie, “ground-floor Roman” called to mind the image of John Keats’s ground-floor apartment on the Piazza di Spagna, at the foot of the Spanish Steps. That Keats apartment is engrained in my mind after reading ABBA, ABBA by Anthony Burgess and The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons.
“Invented” is being used here as a rough synonym for “produced,” and as alluded to above, the final sentence has a misplaced space, and should be “Romantic.”
That part made me wonder if we were reading something that had originally been in a different language and translated (possibly by machine) into English.
Wow, I was apparently completely whooshed by the original post. It took it seriously. I’ll never trust you again, @Johanna. 
Did you bite your thumb at us?
It’s possible, but it didn’t strike me as odd; I thought it was just a creative metaphor.
A friend posted on Facebook a list of bands that were playing at one event and it included:
CHILLI
WACK
It took me a surprisingly long time to figure out it was referring to the popular Canadian band Chilliwack and not some weird new band called Chilli Wack.
It would have led me to expect Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas from TLC. “Oh, I see she’s gone solo.”
I don’t really think of Roman tics as being on the ground floor at all. But rather jumping high to balustrades, parapets or loggia.
But with all the animated gestures that accompany conversation in Italy, how would you know which was a tic?
As an Italian, should I be insulted by this? LOL
I’m Sicilian, so I have license to joke about Italians.
Ah! Okay, you’re good. LOL
I grew up with my aunts and uncles doing that hand thing for real.