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knickers » nipples

Chiefly in:   get one's nipples in a twist

Classification: English – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • “You won’t get your nipples in a twist over our choice this month — there’s no debate how great this one is!” (link)
  • “Just don’t expect me to get my nipples in a twist over your caterwauling about some architecture.” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Michael Palmer (Usenet group soc.motss, 10 April 2006.)

Palmer pointed out a poster’s use of “Go on, get your nipples in a twist” earlier that day, adding that “Google(tm) provides 389 hits, as against 193,000 for the standard knickers (also, 1,430 for nickers, 79 for snickers, 154 for knockers, and 19 for niggers).” The (primarily) British idiom is undoubtedly opaque to American speakers unfamiliar with “knickers” ‘underpants’, and “nipples”, which is phonetically very close to “knickers”, makes some (painful) sense.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2006/05/15 |

pat » packed

Chiefly in:   have/get something down packed

Variant(s):  down-packed

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • I had practiced parallel parking in my driveway for HOURS and I had it down packed… but never on a friggin’ hill. (Blog comment, 2003-07-08)
  • Have self educated myself about a lot of products, books, movies, etc. A lot of trial and error my first pregnancy but now have got my moves down packed. (Amazon.com user profile)
  • I’m sure every Simpsons fan has wondered if they could draw America’s favorite family, and I’m sure plenty of you have got it down-packed. (Amazon.com review, June 26, 2001)
  • Style wise guys, London has got it down packed! (link)
  • I’ve been teaching myself how to play the guitar by ear, so you know that’s draaaging…but hey, for someone learning by ear, I got my shit down packed. (MySpace profile)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • William Salmon (on the American Dialect Society mailing list, 13 May 2006)

The Urban Dictionary laconically states:

> down packed is just a more common variation of its sister phrase “down pat,” meaning to have something memorized or perfected.

| Comments Off link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2006/05/13 |

thumbs up » thumps up

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Two thumps up for a movie about two cowboys (link)
  • “Thumps up or down? Southern Comforter: Thumps up for trying. Carol de Blazer: Down, based just on looks. Up, based on my principle that people have the …” (link)

[Note added by Arnold Zwicky, 15 May 2006: Some of the attested examples are clearly just misspellings of “thumbs”: “This wonderful hitchhiking odyssey is all thumps up (or outstretched as the young boy would tell us).” (link) But among the many thousands of others are surely some in which “thumps” is intended to refer to either blows or noises made by thumping.]

| Comments Off link | entered by Lee Rudolph, 2006/05/11 |

chute » shoot

Classification: English – nearly mainstream

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Elliott, smushed to the edge and with the lowest height, will be the next Idolette to follow little Paris down the shoot. Nerves did him in during Tuesday’s opener…” (link)
  • “Cardboard is to be placed on the floor under the garbage shoot, not down the shoot or in the trash cans. Sleeping in the study lounges and in the computer …” (link)
  • “As you come down the shoot (about 50m long), you’ll find yourself zipping a long at a fast pace and the only eddy is on the right about half way down with …” (link)

“Chute” ’sloping channel or slide to convey things downward (often for disposal)’ is a homophone of “shoot”, and since things often shoot along down a chute, “shoot” is a natural replacement for the otherwise unmotivated “chute” — so natural, indeed, that the New Oxford American Dictionary (2nd ed.) lists it as an alternative to “chute”. The third citation, from a U.K. rivers site, probably shows some influence of the verb “shoot” in “shoot the rapids”.

This one’s not in the standard lists of often-confused words.

| 2 comments | link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2006/05/05 |

ado » to do

Chiefly in:   much to do about nothing , without further to do

Variant(s):  to-do

Classification: English – idiom-related

Spotted in the wild:

  • “It is much to do about nothing because I’m sure it involved human error.” (link)
  • “Much To-Do About Nothing. Why the city’s homeless plan is far from “ambitious.” by Doron Taussig.” (link)
  • “So without further to do lets see what’s new in PHP 5.” (link)
  • “Suddenly, Marc Andreessen appeared on WWW-talk and, without further to-do, introduced an idea for the IMG tag by the Mosaic team.” (link)

First pointed out to me by Thomas Grano, who was searching for occurrences of “much” as a mass determiner and found “much to do about nothing” in his data .

The “much to do about nothing” version is very common indeed: ca. 33,800 raw Google webhits on 13 April 2006; under a thousand for the “without further to do” version. Well, “ado” is rare in modern English except in these two fixed expressions, and “to-do” ‘commotion, fuss’ (which has an etymology parallel to “ado”) fits the overall meaning of both “much ado about nothing” and “without further ado”.

| Comments Off link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2006/05/02 |
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