"A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Arnold Zwicky]

reference to the cited posting by Garson and his next one...

On Sep 2, 2010, at 1:00 PM, Garson O'Toole wrote:
>
> Thanks to Bill Mullins and Vic Steinbok for sharing their findings.
> When investigating the origin of this phrase earlier this year I
> encountered some other resonant examples containing the word "fish".
> The expression "fish without a bicycle" may have been constructed as a
> transformative parody with a gender role reversal from the phrase
> "fish without a tail". The latter expression has been applied to
> gender roles since 1859 or earlier. Here are two examples.
>
> In 1859 a magazine article asks in its title "What is a Bachelor?" The
> answer is given in verses that include the following: "a fish without
> a tail, a ship without a sail; a legless pair of tongs, a fork without
> its prongs."...

these are fairly straightforward instances of one of the analogical proportion frames, X Without Y Is Like W Without Z, conveying ‘Y is an essential part of or accompaniment to X, just as W is to Z’ (there are several specialized variants, in particular "like a day without sunshine"); I have a bunch of current examples collected in 2008.

but the Steinem-style examples (who actually originated the woman-man-fish-bicycle trope is not my interest here; it does seem pretty clear that Steinem served as the point of crystallization) are reverse similes, in which W is not an essential accompaniment to Z, implicating that Y is not an essential accompaniment to X, or in which W is an impediment to Z, implicating that Y should not accompany X.  i got a few recent examples of these sarcastic versions back in 2008, but none pre-Steinem ("Going to war without France is like deer hunting without an accordion"; "A computer without Windows is like a dog without bricks tied to its head”); now it's nice to see earlier examples with man-God instead of woman-man. (of course, sarcastic versions could be developed at any time on the basis of the literal ones, without necessarily deriving from one another.)

the connection to the similar sarcastic analogical trope with "need" -- what i think of as the Like I Need A Hole In the Head figure -- now seems obvious, and it's nice to see some earlier examples  of it.

arnold

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