eggs over easily

Today’s Bizarro:

The expression needs an adverb, right? Easy is an adjective, right? So eggs over easy is wrong-wrong-wrong; it has to be eggs over easily.

Well easy is indeed an adjective, a lot of the time; but it’s also an adverb. And in any case over easy (as a postmodifier of eggs) is an idiom, one of many involving easy used as an adverb; idioms are as they are, even if (like, say, by and large) they violate otherwise general principles of English syntax.

Truncated what the fuck

In a Details (April 2013) interview of Matthew McConaughey (by Adam Sachs), this unlikely passage describing McConaughey’s interaction with a red songbird in New Orleans:

They’re staring at each other now. Then a flash of rencognition seems to pass across the songbird’s glassy features and he chirps out an excitable tune that, to my untrained ears, translates roughly as:

It’s him! Mr. all right all right j.k. livin himself! The bongo-banging, chisel-chested playboy philosopher king inexplicaby here among the vines and branches of my garden paradise on the grounds of this crumbling old Treme mansion! The fuck is he doing here?

The fuck, indeed.

That’s the fuck standing for what the fuck.

dress left/right

Tailor’s terminology for which side of his trousers a man normally stashes his junk on; “Do you dress left or right, sir?” (The crotch dimensions will then be adjusted some to accomodate the man’s hanging on the left or the right.) It came up this morning in connection with my Jon Hamm moose knuckle / freeballing posting; Mike McKinley noted that from the photos, Hamm dresses right.

The idiom isn’t exactly a euphemism, but it is a delicate way of referring to personal information.

occasional

A recent One Big Happy has Ruthie coping with an ambiguity in the English adjective occasional:

Ruthie, quite reasonably, understands occasional in its primary sense, semantically related to the adverb occasionally, but her grandmother is using it in one of its context-restricted idiomatic senses, in which it evokes the noun occasion (a “pseudo-adjective” use of the word).

Commando no more

[TMI Warning: The following posting contains information, opinion, or reflection that some readers might find uncomfortably or unwelcomely personal, private, or intimate in topic or content: too much information, as the saying goes. As a general observation, I’m willing to go almost anywhere in my postings, including some places that some readers don’t want to go.]

When I went into the hospital for my hip replacement operation, I was told to bring loose-fitting clothes. The instructions could have been clearer, but I suspect the medical staff didn’t want to alarm us about how limited and difficult my movements were going to be (they’re really focused on being optimistic and encouraging). I did come prepared with boxer shorts in a generous size (bought specially for this purpose; I’ve been a briefs guy for many decades), but it hadn’t occurred to me that jeans — or, in fact, any ordinary pants or trousers — would be an almost impossible ordeal to get on and off. On the other hand, I’d been living with high-class slippers, very easy to get on and off, as shoes for some time (note on them in a moment). In the end, I left the hospital in the boxers and slippers, plus a t-shirt and a bathrobe. T-shirt, boxers, and slippers became my basic costume for a while, and visitors entered into an unspoken agreement to think of the boxers as short pants instead of underwear.

Viewed that way, I had already gone commando, in pants with no underwear. Then came the sweatpants, and I definitely went commando.

Ab-vengers

Passed on by Elizabeth Zwicky from the Cheezburger site, this pastiche of superheroes that’s all about the abdominals, hence the regrettable portmanteau Ab-vengers (a substitution portmanteau combining abs and Avengers):

The whole thing is heavily sexualized, most spectacularly with Spider-Man presenting his butt in a coy starlet pose. Otherwise, the men are displaying their musculature — especially the abs — and connecting not at all with one another (as collaborators, competitors, or potential partners). Superheroes standing and posing, cruising for tricks the way men do at some gay bars. (There’s a lot of grousing about standing-and-posing, and there are certainly plenty of alternatives, including sports bars, piano bars, dance bars, bars with a lot of political events, and some bars — like Twin Peaks, at Castro and Market in San Francisco, specifically valued for their pleasant atmosphere — but there will always be a place for meat markets.)

Brief mention: toolbook

An NBC news analyst, reporting on the U.S. Presidential election last night:

We need to look at our toolbook — I mean our toolbox, our playbook…

A blend of two (somewhat) idiomatic compounds, conveniently identified for us in the speaker’s own correction.

Note that the contributors to the blend are very similar in structure: both are N + N compounds, both Ns are monosyllables, and box and book are already very similar phonologically. General principle:

The greater the degree of morphological and phonological similarity, the more likely semantically similar items are to interfere with one another in blends.

Related blends: pitchfork from pitch pipe + tuning fork (from a musician); rocket surgery from rocket science + brain surgery (dismissively, in contexts like It’s not ___); jerry-rigged from jerry-built + jury-rigged; heart-wrenching from heart-breaking + gut-wrenching; Achilles’ tooth from Achilles’ heel + sweet tooth.

And note that toolbook also exists as a deliberate portmanteau, presumably of toolbox and handbook:

ToolBook is a Microsoft Windows programming environment, released in 1990 by Asymetrix Corporation (later known as click2learn and SumTotal Systems). In that day ToolBook was a competitor to Visual Basic as a programming environment. Over the years ToolBook has been enhanced to allow for the creation of web-based (HTML) content as well. (link)

 

until the eagle grins

Susan Cheever in Newsweek for August 13th and 20th, p. 6,“Gin Without the Tonic”, on the rich:

There are still titans with a conscience in the 21st century — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Oprah Winfrey, for instance — but some of the rich hang on to their money until the eagle grins.

The point of interest here is until the eagle grins, an idiom that will probably baffle most non-Americans (and some Americans as well).

Take my wife

I recently came across a reference to the Henny Youngman “take my wife” joke, which turns on the ambiguity of that phrase, with two very different uses of take, one of them very restricted in its syntax and discourse function, the other free in both respects.

Begging to differ

Yesterday’s Bizarro:

A cute pun on beg, involving beg ‘ask for something, typically food or money, as charity or a gift’ (NOAD2) and the idiom beg to differ ‘politely disagree’. As it turns out, these two uses of beg are historically related.