“The chicken—you dressed the chicken?” asked Mrs. Rogers.
She lifted the lid.
There lay the chicken. And he was just as dressed as he could be [in a darling little green coverall and tiny booties to match].
from Amelia Bedelia
written by Peggy Parish
pictures by Fritz Siebel
Harper & Row, 1963
Puns, idioms, and slapstick, that’s my kind of humor.
I’m sure you’re not surprised to find out that I keep a list of idiomatic phrases and that I titled it “Where Did They Come From” and it’s arranged in alphabetical order so I can quickly find what I’m looking for. I’ll share some of that list, but first a little about Peggy Parish (7/14/27-11/19/88), the creator of Amelia Bedelia, herself.
Although she’s best know for her twelve books staring Amelia Bedelia, Peggy published 40 books beginning with My Golden Book of Manners (1961). Her teaching career began in New York at the Dalton School in Manhattan where she taught for 15 years. Her creativity flourished as she was inspired by her third-grade students. She wrote mysteries, arts and crafts books, and other works of fiction.
From an un-cited Wikipedia article, “[t]he author's word-play, and Amelia Bedelia's fundamental goodness and childlike simplicity appeal to youngsters who are beginning to see and enjoy more than one meaning in a word or a phrase.”
I will add adult appeal to that description.
Early in my career, my supervisor and I decided to take Amelia on the road in an original play that combined the funniest and most outrageous elements in many of Ms. Parish’s books. We set a high bar for Summer Reading experiences for kids and their grown-ups (and the performers). One of the highlights of my career was bringing Amelia Bedelia to life as she (I) ran over a tablecloth with an iron and dusted (not undusted) the furniture with dusting powder. And yes, I even dressed a chicken.
But those literalisms are based on puns. Idioms are a whole different kettle of fish.
All languages have funny phrases. I’ll concentrate on English, and American English at that. Some came into our language based on meanings that are racist, misogynistic, or otherwise cruel. Some origins are Biblical. Some create a funny mental image. And we use them at the drop of a hat.
I discovered McGraw-Hill’s Dictionary of American Idioms. The introductory info is wildly interesting (to me). Here’s the link. Another handy source is The Phrase Finder. Instead of scrolling through a compendium of phrases, this one lets you click on the first letter.
I’ll break the ice with this phrase. It means to bend a social convention or begin a discussion. It is an old naval term. When a ship was the only way to transport goods, it could forge a path for others to follow. The phrase was first recorded by Sir Thomas North in his 1579 translation of Plutarch's Lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes. It’s meaning changed through time. Language is a living entity, after all.
That’s pretty innocuous, but my girls were shy. If someone spoke to either of them, they tended to hide behind my skirts, literally. “Cat’s got your tongue?” a grown-up might ask with a snicker. And while it is not substantiated according to The Phrase Finder, the phrase could be another nautical term. This one referring to the whip used mercilessly on underlings for a variety of missteps. The threat of the “cat-o-nine-tails” would make any sailor leery of speaking out.
But not my girls. They were just dyed-in-the-wool shy. When wool is dyed before it is spun into thread, the color goes deep. It actually becomes part of the material. Wool dyed after spinning is not as colorfast. Their shyness was built in. But not anymore! They speak up and my grandkids do, too.
Getting down to brass tacks, that is, discussing the nuts and bolts, or discovering what is really important may have been a reference to actual flat-headed tacks used in the furniture industry to affix upholstery to the frame of a chair or sofa. The old fabric had to be removed, down to the brass tacks, before it could be replaced. My grandfather was a haberdasher; he made hats. It’s said that cloth for hats was measured between two brass tacks on a board to provide a more accurate measurement than by judging an arm’s length.
Contrasting that exact measurement is the rule of thumb, or approximation. The origin of this one is controversial, to say the least. It’s first seen in print in a published sermon by James Durham, printed in Heaven Upon Earth, 1658. He said, “many profest Christians are like to foolish builders, who build by guess, and by rule of thumb and not by Square and Rule.” In 1782, Judge Sir Francis Buller is said to have sent down a ruling saying a man was allowed to beat his wife with a stick provided it was no thicker than his thumb. A satirical cartoon referred the judge as “Judge Thumb.” That meaning stuck, even though the ruling was never confirmed as true, and the feminist interpretation holds fast.
Many people want to call a spade a spade, name something exactly how it is. Some people attribute the phrase to Aristophanes (d. 388 BCE) or Plutarch (d. 120 CE). Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) used it. But so did Erasmus (1469 -1536) the Dutch playwright. When Nicholas Udall translated Erasmus in 1542, the phrase entered the English language. Erasmus’s spade and Udall’s translation described a garden tool. It wasn’t until the late 1920s, during the Harlem Renaissance, that the phrase referred to Black people. By 1936 the 4th edition of H. L. Mencken’s The American Language identified the phrase as derogatory. And by 1989, Robert L. Chapman confirmed its offensiveness in his Thesaurus of American Slang.
But if the picture of having an iron stomach or the vision of pigs flying or rain falling like cats and dogs strike your funny bone, by all means, spice up your language with them.
I’m reading Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, 2023). The story takes place during COVID when the main character’s three grown children come back home. As Lara tells them the story of when she was involved with a famous actor, they each examine their own lives and their relationships with her.
-—Be curious! (and take time to laugh)
FB: As Salman Rushdie’s character in The Satanic Verses (Viking, 1988) noted as he plummeted to earth in a parachute that failed to open, “a little levity [is needed] in the gravity of the situation,” here’s a little levity in the gravity of our own times. Although Mr. Rushdie’s puns on levity and gravity make his work much funnier than mine, I hope you find a smile or chuckle here, all the same.