Russian racehorses, Cooter Brown, fast foxes

[Dennis R. Preston]

Unfortunately, I cannot confirm Arnold's Louisville roommate's Mamie.

By the way, there are pretty good bibliographical resources (better for
historical documentation than regional) for these proverbialisms and
proverbial comparisons. With some modesty, I point to a pretty thorough
list of those resources in an old study of mine. It is on pp. 84-85 of my
"Proverbial comparisons from Southern Indiana Orbis 24,1:72-114 (1975).
(That reminds me that I offered the all-time alliterative proverbial
comparison challenge in that list with "Hotter than a fast-fucked fox in a
forest fire." No contender has ever entered the fray.

dInIs



>no on the racehorses (russian or otherwise), yes on cooter
>brown (from southern speakers, and not for some years now).
>
>a college friend, from louisville (hi, dInIs), used a number of
>comparisons with personal names, like cooter brown, in them.  the only
>one i recall now is "colder than / as cold as miss mamie johnson's
>room" (frequently said of my senior-year dormitory room, which was at
>the top of a tower in a 19th-century building and was not at all
>effectively heated).
>
>it did occur to me at the time to write a short story in which
>all of these folks were gathered together.
>
>arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736