? ? ? k eep a cow

[Laurence Horn]

>In a message dated 4/25/05 12:46:37 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:
>
>
>>
>>  Not to mention "(go) fuck a duck", which has rhetorical, if not
>>  semantic, advantages.
>>
>>  Larry
>>
>
>A friend of mine was in jail in the 1950s with a man who was there for, uhm,
>trifling with this sort of poultry in this sort of way. The pragmatic
>advantages of ducks (as oppposed to snakes) seem clear enough--do the semantic
>advantages not follow?

Well, I was comparing ducks to mammals (dogs, cows, sheep) rather
than to reptiles.  No doubt there's a scale operating here, not to
mention the chacun-a-son-goût (or is chacun-a-son-goat?) factor.

L