[Ads-l] Don't urinate on my leg...
Wilson Gray
hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sun Jun 12 01:42:28 UTC 2016
On Sat, Jun 11, 2016 at 12:24 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> SWAG: "Spit in my face..." is the original form, since to "spit in
> someone's face" is a long-established idiom.
>
The _spit_ version is the oldest version that I'm familiar with.
Back in '75, a former girlfriend, themselves 6'2", told me that their older
brother, 6'7", got fed up with having to deal with that stale chestnut,
"How's the weather up there?"
So, when someone asked him that, he would spit into that person's face and
reply:
"It's raining."
They made no attempt to align this anecdote with the saying and it didn't
occur to me to try to connect the two. So, IMO, any resemblance is purely
coincidental.
--
-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
------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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