irishfella’s plans always come to fruitition, and he considers his spontanuity to be one of his biggest assets.
His ability to completely mess with a good word is astounding- but he does make me laugh.
Dad used to say Cheap at half the price. I always found it annoying.
From a NY Times story today:
I imagine the snake supporting a silver platter on its head, with its fangs nicely arranged to be served.
I would, too–in the family with metathesis and epenthesis. The thing with the OP is that these “sayings” have become catchphrases or cliches, and in that way, they are becoming like idioms where the literal sense of the words isn’t important.
I don’t think it shows a thoughtless person so much as a person who perhaps doesn’t read that much. It’s not enough to make me judgmental or throw things.
Wait, you get a half hour extra sleep in the military? I wouldn’t have thought that.
The NYT actually reversed the appropriate versions of baring/bearing in that sentence.
You’re right! Is this some sort of meta version of Gaudere’s law, that I carefully scoured my own writing for typos, but then missed mocking a second one of theirs?
Now in addition to the snake with the silver platter, I’m imagining flags with a naked sports mascot on them, too.
Like the Good Book says - “Do unto others as they hath done unto you” (Arthur Daly)
I am SO going to say John Henry from now on. 
YogSosoth- do the users of “peaked” mean the definition here? - pique - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Or do they mean “aroused my interest” or “caught my interest” as I have heard sometimes?
Neither peaked nor piqued means that.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/peaked
http://www.onelook.com/?w=peaked&ls=a
Argh. :smack:
Um, what I was really implying was that anyone who is stoopid enough to think that Hancock signed the Constitution. . .
Aw, nevermind.
Now I suppose I’ve lost all my rights to sneer?
Oh just one more itsy-bitsy sneer.
When I was a kid my mother was in an organization with a woman who called and told me to tell Mom that she was going to hurry and get down to the meeting early so she could get the coffee urine started before everyone got there.
Yum.
It’s in sense #3 here. One’s curiosity is pricked. I’ve been known to indulge in peak of fit, myself, if a fit of pique seems inadequate.
Business I worked for had a small kitchen and they wanted to let people know they could order what they wanted, not just take something from the warmer. I changed my co-worker’s sign as she had written Special Orders Excepted.
Not phrases, but words that I wish people would pronounce correctly, Chaps and Forte, losing battle I know, but one needs dreams.
Surely the most likely source is Shakespeare’s Macbeth?
That’s certainly where I picked it up from - we use it all the time instead of “crack of dawn”.
Act IV, Scene I:
“Thou art too like the spirit of Banquo: down~!
Thy crown does sear mine eye-balls. And thy hair,
Thou other gold-bound brow, is like the first.
A third is like the former. Filthy hags!
Why do you show me this? A fourth! Start, eyes!
What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?”
(Not saying the eschatological sense is not the ultimate origin, but I’d imagine more people will have heard it from Macbeth than Tolkien as it was in common usage decades before LOTR was written)
You’re probably right, but I made the comment about Tolkien – as I stated – because two previous posters had explicitly brought Tolkien up. I suspected that Tolkien was not the source of her ex’s choice of the phrase, whether through Macbeth or not.
How would you pronounce “Chaps”, and in what context?
I just love how descriptivists are stupid when they are the ones who discovered the rules in the first place, and prescriptivists always wind up having to change their tune about something being wrong.
How is it smarter to tell people the way things should be, rather than observe how they actually are?
I was in a seminar last week, and the presenter kept saying “Depth and Breath” for “Depth and Breadth”. The slides were misspelled, too.
What do you mean?