Heard on the Mad Dog

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:48 PM -0500 11/20/07, James Harbeck wrote [re Chris "Mad Dog"
Russo's innovation of '"That game lost its mustard" yesterday]:

>Some people are genii at mixing cliches. My wife has come up with
>some spectacular keepers:
>
>"That really turns my goat."
>"We'll have to put the gun to the wire."
>"I got it at a dime and pop store."
>
>I think Mad Dog is in the same league, doing basically the same
>thing: grabbing words from half-remembered cliches and sticking them
>together in a way that feels right. As to why "mustard" feels right,
>it may simply be an aesthetic valence taken on through collocation
>(cut the mustard), assonance (muster, perhaps), and taste experience
>(mustard = extra flavour with an edge).
>
As another illustration of the way Mad Dog has with cliches, I was
going to cite one of his favored turns, "until the absolute cows come
home". Not really a malaprop, but...
I thought I'd better check to make sure it's not used all the time by
non-sports-talk-show hosts.  Turns out there are four supposed google
hits, but three of them just reference "until the cows come home"
with no bovine modification.  The fourth gets you to a post on ads-l
from 2004 about, yup, this same usage of Mad Dog's.  Nice to know he
appears to have preserved his uniqueness.

LH

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