Singin' "hey diddle diddle" with your kitty in the middle

[venta]

Over on her own journal, quisalan's been asking people for phrases they use which no one else knows. I know I've become infamous for these, so I'm not going to demonstrate again that I live on another planet from everyone else.

However, cryx suggested the rather marvellous "That won't get the baby ironed", an amalgam of "That won't get the baby bathed" and "That won't get the shirts ironed". Which reminded me that running two proverbs together has produced some of my favourite phrases ever.

I first became aware of this as a concept during an episode of, er, My Word, I think - something featuring Frank Muir, anyway. One of those involved was talking about his mother-in-law's habit of confusing proverbs, and gave the following examples:

That gets right up my goat (= That gets my goat + That gets right up my nose)
The ball's on the other foot now (= The ball's in your court + The boot's on the other foot now)

I immediately adopted them as my own.

Another one I encountered quite recently is the winceworthy statement of intention to get on with something, provided for me by JdB:

I must get my teeth to the grindstone (= I must get my teeth into it + nose to the grindstone). Though why putting any part of your face to the grindstone is supposed to be beneficial is a bit of a mystery.

The best bit about these is that (to me, anyway) their meaning is immediately apparent, even though they're not standard phrases. Whether this is from the context in which they're used, from the tone of voice, or from the ability of the hearer to untangle the two phrases is open to debate.

A fine set of candidates for this combination approach is the vast range of phrases which are used to indicate that someone has asked a stupid question, to which the answer is so obviously "yes" that it wasn't worth the asking.

The first one I remember knowing was "Do ducks swim?", used as follows:

A: Would you like a cup of tea?
B: Do ducks swim ?

Does a bear shit in the woods ?
Is the Pope a Catholic ?
Does Judith Charmers have a passport ?
Does the Trojan horse have a wooden willy ?

Great phrases all, but clearly inferior to, for example, asking whether ducks are Catholic or whether the Pope shits in the woods. My dad seems to have settled on "Is the Pope a duck ?" for his question of choice.

If anyone has any more variants, I'd be delighted to add them to the mix'n'match line-up.

Comments

[stegzy.livejournal.com]

Ah I tend to create my own proverbs or sayings sometimes based on Health and Safety notices and warnings but others on trinkets of wisdom.

eg when chums tell me about getting back with an old flame

Don't go back to a dud firework

or when someones digging up or stirring trouble

Those that play with wasps nests get stung

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Don't go back to a dud firework

That's good. In conversation with someone who I will not name in order to protect the guilty, this practice has also been officially determined to be like a dog returning to its vomit.

[quisalan.livejournal.com]

That's a biblical quote, isn't it?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Proverbs 26, 11:

As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.