Lebofsky lexicon

[Laurence Horn]

>On May 2, 2005, at 1:16 PM, Mark A. Mandel wrote:
>
>>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>Poster:       "Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU>
>>Subject:      Re: Lebofsky lexicon
>>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>--------
>>
>>Barry quotes:
>>>>>>>
>>Pg. ?: Close the stable or the horse'll get out, who died--your flag
>>is at
>>half-mast, your lunch box is open, flies cause disease--keep yours
>>closed,
>>what do birds do?-- your fly is open.
>>  <<<<<
>>
>>The only one of these I've ever heard is the "flag" one. I'll add:
>>         "X. Y. Z.: EXamine Your Zipper"
>>
>>-- Mark
>>[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]
>>
>
>>From those late, lamented days of the button fly, I remember:
>
>It's N o'clock in Petersville, where N is the number of loose buttons.
>
>The barn[sic] door's open and the horse is running out.
>
>I don't know why we said "barn" and not "stable," since horses,
>horse-drawn wagons, and stables for horses all were still commonplace
>in my childhood, but there were no barns.

We had no barns but a few stables in NYC (for those NYPD horses), but
"closing the barn door after the horses are out/have escaped" (or
variations) was a standard metaphor, not specifically for closing
one's fly; perhaps this (which I haven't heard, any more than the N
o'clock one) is a variation on that theme.  The question of why it's
the barn and not the stable door would really apply to the more
general and I think more widely extant metaphor for the too
little/too late reference.

Larry

>  In St. Louis, horses had to
>be shod with rubber horseshoes, so as to ease the noise pollution
>caused by hundreds of thousands of clippity-clops a day on the paved
>streets.
>
>-Wilson Gray