[Ads-l] QOTY, sports division?

ADSGarson O'Toole adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM
Fri Nov 20 01:50:21 UTC 2015


LH wrote:
> Alabama coach Nick Saban at a presser, on how nobody should =
> automatically assume his team will waltz over unheralded Charleston =
> Southern this Saturday (Alabama is favored by 20 points):
>
> =
> http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaaf-dr-saturday/nick-saban-compares-2011-g=
> ame-to-a-human-waste-function--video-143034968.html
>
> The relevant passage, as it were, is around 1:10; Saban is describing =
> how his dominant national championship team a few years ago had =
> considerable trouble stopping the equally unheralded Georgia Southern =
> team.  More precisely, he recalls, "They ran through our ass like shit =
> through a tin horn".   A southernism, it appears. =20

Back in 2012 I initiated a discussion thread about that figure of
speech. For example, below is a citation with a General Patton
attribution.

The tin horn symbolically represented an alimentary canal, I would
conjecture. Butter, water, and mud in the 1800s and early 1900s
represented feces. Hence, when Saban mentions an ass together with
shit he is re-concretizing the figurative language.

AFS Message Title: Simile: like *substance* through a tin horn
Date: April 3, 2012
Poster: Garson

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2012-April/118157.html

Year: 1998 (Reprint)
Title: The Patton papers 1940-1945
Author: George S Patton; Martin Blumenson
Publisher: New York : Da Capo Press

http://books.google.com/books?id=RRolDuahqPMC&q=%22tin+horn%22#v=snippet&

[Begin excerpt]
Question: Once through the Siegfried Line, will the advance be much
like the last push?
Patton: I think we will go like shit through a tin horn.
[End excerpt]

Garson

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