look their noses down

Herb Stahlke hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM
Tue Mar 6 05:18:39 UTC 2012


I've heard "look prn. nose down" occasionally and wondered why "look
down" would be treated as a verb-particle construction.  "Look their
noses down" gets about 12k raw googits while "look down their noses"
gets about 5.5 million.  This evening on The Daily Dish, Sullivan
quotes a writer who writes
(http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/03/why-does-everyone-hate-jury-duty-ctd.html):

People fight and die and protest for rights such as a jury trial. Yet
many look their noses down at the right as if it were a used Kleenex.

Herb

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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