> At 10:20 AM 8/12/2010, Jordan Hayes wrote:
>
>
> >>Has anybody else ever heard the hybrid "burr up your ass" before?
> >>Or is this a novelty?
> >
> >~9200 hits in The Google :-)
Gee. I shoulda thought of that.
Years ago, when I was in the linguistics racket, I observed that the only thing that ever screws up a proverbial expression is getting crossed with another proverbial expression. That is, you don't get arbitrary substitutions, like "fish of a different color," or not very often anyway. But you frequently get chimerical mashups of two proverbs. I used to have quite a collection of these, which I now seem to have misplaced. I remember "ducks in a barrel" -- the hellspawn of "shooting fish in a barrel" and "duck soup".
Oh, and the proverbs had to inhabit the same or at least neighboring semantic domains to get crossed up.
--
Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com http://cars-suck.org