And then a God who really ought not to exist sticks out a great big hand and grabs me by the wrist

[venta]

Why do people say

"That'll go down like a lead balloon"

and mean that the thing in question will go down badly ?

Surely if there's anything a lead balloon will do extremely well, it's go down. Great ideas should be likened to lead balloons.

I propose the phrase

"That'll go down like a helium ferret"

instead.

Comments

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it's not to do with the ability of a lead balloon to rise or fall per se, but rather with the fact that a lead balloon would bloody useless. Like a chocolate teapot. Or perhaps it is, and by 'go down' they meant 'fail', 'sink', and it's merely coincidence that we now also use the phrase 'go down' to mean 'be received'.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Opens up the question of why is it that 'go down' means 'be received': I guess it's in the swallowing / digestive sense? In which case someting received badly should go down like a particularly spiky and undercooked baby hedgehog, or something like that.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

I guess it's in the swallowing / digestive sense

I imagine so.

In that sense, a lead balloon would also go down very badly! Though perhaps not as badly as a spiky lead balloon.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Like a chocolate teapot.

See, I've never got why a chocolate teapot would be useless, because you can eat it. Sure, you don't have a teapot at the end, but chocolate is chocolate even if someone moulded it to something silly like a teapot.

[venta.livejournal.com]

It's useless as a teapot... particularly if you're a chocolate-hater who wants a cup of tea. If you described it as a chocolate novelty shape it'd be fine, but that's selling it quite differently.

I only became familiar with the phrase "chocolate teapot" relatively recently. Useless things in our house were always as much as use as a chocolate fireguard.

[marjory.livejournal.com]

'Chocolate novelty shape' just sounds oo-er to me.

Of course, that would be to me...

[uitlander]

I switched from 'chocolate teapot' to 'lead balloon' as my epithet of choice when someone pointed out (I think it may have been lanfykins that you could eat a chocolate teapot, and it would be most tasty).