Continuing the metaphor: orange traffic cones are like the Legos strewn around the floor for the enjoyment of our feet. Potholes are teenage acne. Tickets are tuition bills.
A little cross-strip banter –
Hey, I don’t care that it’s been debunked, we can still have jokes based on it!
And I still maintain that the ugly Internet phenomenon of “trolling” started being called that from a metaphor on the fishing practice (dragging a baited hook behind a quiet small boat), and not the Scandinavian bridge-dwelling threateners.
Are we done with Bizarro for this post? Never say so!
I was preparing to protest that the expression is traditionally “strait and narrow” — which would be preferable despite its redundancy. The pattern of redundancy in rhetorical pairs remains hale and hearty, though some may wish it null and void.
But no! The useful sources recognize only “straight and narrow”, with just a nod to the echoes of “strait”. Here’s Etymonline f’ristance [in entry for straight (adj.2) = “conventional,” especially “heterosexual,” 1941]:
probably suggested by the stock phrase straight and narrowpath or way, “course of conventional morality and law-abiding behavior” (by 1842), which is based on a misreading of Matthew vii.14 (where the gate is actually strait); another influence seems to bestrait-laced.
Rather dumb word-argument. But it prompts memory of an assortment of senior-targeted advertising campaigns which for a while used the phrasing “age 50 or better” or “age seventy-and-a-half or better” etcetera. It was supposed to be obvious, yet a sort of joke, that better would mean older. At least one that I heard regularly for a while did change to older; but then later reverted to better ; so I guess there was some complaint but it got resolved, or just overruled.
Come to think of it, probably the word-level associations of squashing things must have played a role in my lifelong aversion to the vegetable of that name.
Chak notes “I’ve read En attendant Godot several times, and I still don’t have a clue.”
Could one expect Godot to comment? Waiting for your comments below.
TBH, I don’t entirely understand this. I mean, I understand the heartwarming message about group loyalty and generosity — but not whether there was actually supposed to be anything funny.
Wait, could this be heading for an idiom-origins story about “bought the farm”? No? Nah!
Usual John sent this one. The older man is the manager two levels up.
Puzzled? Think “Exit 1, Exit 2, and Exit 3.”
A devoted cat person is going to be reluctant to blame sneezes on sensitivity to the cat. And cats are in return sensitive over human sneezing, as shown in panels 3 and 4. My cats are even more sensitive than Ludwig, and likely would run away at the point of Achoo!
Kilby writes: This is another comic that CIDU Bill drafted in 2019, but never actually posted. I think most readers will get it pretty quickly, but I have to admit that it took me a moment before I figured out the point; perhaps the same thing happened to Bill as well.