2011-09-20

Idiom Watch


  • Generous portion - Maybe I just have a general problem with food-based idioms, but this one also bugs me. First of all, one can only give or receive a generous portion, otherwise from who's overflowing bounty stems this generosity? Greedy portion, sure. Take a greedy portion all day long for all I care. Let the language fit the crime! Otherwise talking about portion sizes in 20XX America can't help but raise the question, are your super-sized soda and fries really the products of Ray Kroc's generosity?
  • His nibs - This Britishism comes to me from a talking bird in the Iain M. Banks book Excession, who used the genderless form "its nibs" to draw attention to actions taken by a sentient spaceship that it considered haughty. Flippant, mocking, and prefuture. Does language get any better than that?

No comments:

Post a Comment