Archive for Idioms
Emptying a boot is a different matter entirely.
Just saw someone on a BoardGameGeek forum use the phrase “I am in the same shoe with you,” which I don’t recall ever encountering before. I like it—it was immediately clear what it means—but now I’m curious about it. A Google search for [“same shoe with you”] shows only about 13,000 instances of that phrase […]
In response to a Facebook post of mine in 2017, a friend introduced me to the word malaphor, which refers to a phrase that mixes two (or more) idioms. My post used the phrase “The devil’s hands make light work.” A couple of other examples that friends gave in comments: The road to hell wasn’t […]
Reading a Thurber essay about Henry James, I came across this phrase: James’s Renunciation Scene is managed, as who should say, rather more exquisitely than Hammett’s I hadn’t encountered the phrase as who should say before, so I mentally marked it to look up later, and I kept reading. On the next page, Thurber writes: […]
The idiom is from cricket, but I would think it would also apply to soccer/football and baseball, and maybe hockey?
Just happened across this recombinant idiom, apparently written by Roland Bruno on Board Game Geek: Opinions are like wishes. You can lead them to water but you can’t teach them new tricks. (See also a previous post in which I learned that phrases like these are also known as dundrearyisms.)
The word 'tank' has a surprising variety of slang meanings, actually.
Give these idioms a big hand!
The OED didn't help, although I was surprised to learn that 'booty' (as in pirate) was probably not derived from 'boot' meaning profit (as in the phrase 'to boot'), at least not directly.
I don't know if the difference between the British and American frowns comes in to play, here, but I suppose it might.