heads, hands--who cares!

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Tue Sep 4 01:50:59 UTC 2012


On Sep 1, 2012, at 11:40 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:

> That would still make for an odd hybrid of "burying their heads in the
> sand" and "sitting on their hands", which others used in exactly the
> same context.
>
>    VS-)

True, but as hybrids go, "sitting on their heads" would be more vivid than "burying their hands in the sand".

LH
>
> On 9/1/2012 9:48 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>> Perhaps he meant "do nothing" rather than "be blind to the problem".
>>
>> At 9/1/2012 01:30 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>>> Picked this up from a Steve Benen post on TRMS:
>>>
>>> "When people in the future look back at Romney's contempt for the idea
>>> of "slowing the rise of the oceans," and his party's willingness to bury
>>> their hands in the sand, history will not be kind."
>>>
>>> Searching for "bury their hands in the sand" and variations gives a
>>> noticeable number of hits, but not nearly as many to one would expect
>>> from a fully-formed eggcorn. Most hits appear to be leading to the
>>> lyrics from the same song, but there are still a couple of dozen that
>>> look eggcornish. With Benen, I thought he might have been making a pun,
>>> of sorts (oceans, hands in the sand?) but heads in the sand would have
>>> had the same effect.
>>>
>>>     VS-)
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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



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