[Ads-l] "eat, breathe, and sleep"
Arnold Zwicky
zwicky at STANFORD.EDU
Sat Apr 11 11:32:49 UTC 2015
> On Apr 11, 2015, at 4:04 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>
> 'To be entirely dedicated to.'
>
> Quite familiar to me for decades. Not in OED.
>
> TV promo: "Amy eats, breathes, and sleeps Beauty!"
on Language Log:
Eric Bakovic, Snowclone shortening, 11/14/05
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/002646.html
on the snowclone “X eats, drinks, and sleeps Y” ‘all X does is Y, ‘all X does is (related to) Y, X has an all-consuming dedication to Y’; shortened to “X sleeps Y”
Mark Liberman, Eating, drinking, sleeping snowclones, 11/15/05
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002647.html
"this is a remarkably "modular" snowclone, allowing a wide variety of conjoined verbs beyond eat, drink, and sleep, in numerous permutations and combinations"
------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
More information about the Ads-l
mailing list