Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
“All this oil flowing all over the place, and I remember my Dad coming back just sopping in oil, and he stinks and smelling like a Cheshire cat. ...
The county of Cheshire has the city of Chester (home of all those chestser drawers) as its county town. Cheshire is famous for its cheeses which may have attracted mice, and consequently made Cheshire cats grin. The expression pre-dates Lewis Carroll, first appearing in print in 1795 in Peter Pindar’s Pair of Lyric Epistles: “Lo, like a Cheshire cat our court will grin.” It is claimed that cheeses were moulded in the shape of a cat and eaten tail-first, leaving the grinning head until last.
Anyone unfamiliar with Pindar (fair enough, I suppose) and Carroll (surely not?) might associate Cheshire only with cheese and its smell, with which, perhaps, the cat baited its breath.
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Two of my favorite funnies (non-eggcorns) are somewhat related to this one:
You smell like the deacons!
We’re going to come out of this smelling like a bandit!
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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