Inspired by something I said last night when complaining about an achievement at work and the only way I could think to describe it was “pure frippery.”
Last week a coworker described a restaurant as being “kitty-corner” from our office. Took me forever to figure out what they meant
I occasionally hear “catty-corner” too.
I was always under the impression that was a similar expression to ‘dog-eared’, i.e. a bit beaten up. But maybe I’m conflating it with another phrase
Dog-eared means that a corner got folded down (making a diagonal) on a page as a bookmark. A dog-eared book isn’t necessarily beat-up beyond the damage to the corners of pages. Catty-cornered or kitty-cornered is adjacent to something on the diagonal, i.e. not orthogonally next to it like up, down, left, or right. So there is an argument to be made for a loose (coincidental) connection between those ideas, but I don’t think they come from the same roots.
I’m my area it’s said “caddy corner”, or you might hear the random old euphemistic “caddy-wampus” which means either “diagonal to reference position” or “all fucked up!”
I used the phrase “tilting at windmills” when discussing current politics and got looked at like an insane person.
No one reads anymore, apparently.
Heh. Back in my youth in the 1990s I used dated slang ironically and now it is part of my daily vocabulary. Neither myself or anybody else can tell if it is ironic or not. Now I’m just a middle aged man speaking in a weird capitol city dialect in the second largest city, which by the locals is a crime on its own.
That’s shits tubular, yo!
Shit of a beast
‘Spasmodic’. A boy walked in the sidewalk and he showed signs of having cerebral palsy… Somehow that word popped up and it surprised me how topical that word was and that I don’t realize how I know the word.
I use the phrase “wide-awake nightmare” kind of a lot.
At least I know where I picked it up from, the Screaming Skull episode of MST3k.
One of my new favorites when trying to decide if something is worth doing - “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”
jimmanuel centennial carter
