[Ads-l] Idiom backfire

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

I first heard the nudity joke a few decades ago. It is listed in two
references under "Nudity". Below is an instance in 1952.

Placing this joke in a "mangled idiom" or "twisted idiom" category
makes sense, but I have not yet seen it under that grouping.

Date: May 26, 1952
Newspaper: The Capital Times
Newspaper Location: Madison, Wisconsin
Article: From Where I Sit
Author: Herb Jacobs
Quote Page 2, Column 6
Database: Newspapers.com
https://www.newspapers.com/image/521616996/?terms=nudity
[Begin excerpt]
Just to prove that her pattern of thought was consistent, I hasten to
quote her settled opinions on nudity of any sort. If the good Lord had
intended us to run around naked," she said, "we would have been born
that way."
[End excerpt]

[ref] 1971, Bartlett's Unfamiliar Quotations by Leonard Louis
Levinson, Topic: Nudity, Quote Page 206, Cowles Book Company: Henry
Regnery Company, Chicago, Illinois. (Verified with scans)[/ref]
[Begin excerpt]
If God had meant for people to go nude they would have been born that way.
Ad in The Village Voice
[End excerpt]

[ref] 1986,The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations,
Compiled by Fred Metcalf, Section: Nudity, Quote Page 177, Viking
Penguin, New York. (Verified on paper)[/ref]
[Begin excerpt]
If God had wanted us to walk around naked, we would have been born that way.
Anon
[End excerpt]

Garson

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 1:46 AM Mark Mandel <markamandel at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Here are a couple of items posted in a blog conversation by Ace Lightning,
> a Dreamwidth user; reposted here by her permission:
>
> When I was first learning Wicca <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicca>, my
> mother objected to the idea of a whole bunch of people going skyclad
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyclad_%28Neopaganism%29> together - and
> she said, "If we were supposed to run around without clothes, we'd be born
> that way!" - and then realized what she'd said. We had a good laugh about
> that.
>
> I've got another one like that. When my son was a teenager, we were having
> a typical adult/teenager disagreement, and I was very angry, and I started
> to say, "Why, you little son-of-a-bitch!" - and caught myself. After that
> we were both laughing too hard to argue any more.
>
> Is there any study or collection of anecdotes like these, in which a
> speaker uses an idiom or trope, which then "backfires" as the speaker or a
> hearer recognizes it as absurd in the current context?
>
> Mark Mandel
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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