killing people and breaking things

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Thu Apr 28 23:37:37 UTC 2011


On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 6:35 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> "killing people and breaking things" (particularly in that
> emotionally anticlimactic order)

Reminds me of the drill sergeant's (in my day, "drill instructor" and
"DI" were Marines-isms, not used in The War),

[I'm going to start] kicking ass and taking names!

I.e., first, punishment would be meted out universally. After that,
the sergeant would concern himself with discovering the identity of
the actual perpetrator(s) of the fuck-up.

The perhaps-apocryphal "Kill them all! God/Allah will recognize his own!"

and its variants may possibly be an extension, semantically, at least.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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