duck soup
Barry Popik recently posted an antedate for the metaphor, duck soup [cf easy as pie]. Im wondering if an older Turkish joke might be considered a metaphorical usage. FWIW:Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2004...
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Im wondering if an older Turkish joke might be considered a metaphorical usage.No, IMHO.
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Not disagreeing, Dr T, but considering: wouldn't the sense of "duck soup" as being something easy fit in nicely with the idea of only having to go to where the ducks were? That is, how did "duck soup"...
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That's a different question.And so, a different answer: I think the idea of "duck soup" as something easy may well be related to the idea that it's duck in water and ducks are already in water.All you...
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It certainly isn't particularly easy to catch a duck. For a bet I once jumped in the river and tried to get hold of one, but the little bugger swam just fast enough to avoid me. It was the day Charles...
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>All you have to do is boil the lake... Easy for phds, no doubt. Not so sure the questions are different -- if the joke were the source of the metaphorical usage (another Harper's Magazine article...
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The "Turkish joke" is actually Persian; Mulla Nasreddin is the protagonist of an endless series of jokes, comparable to the Chelm jokes of Yiddish tradition, that have been popular from time...
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Sorry, yes, if you mean metaphorical in the sense of anything that is not literal, then it's a metaphorical use. I thought you were asking if the joke is an instance of metaphorical sense of...
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It was the day Charles and Diana got married. The pubs were open all day, which wasn't normally allowed in those days, which may have had something to do with it. (The fact that I was in the river,...
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A WORK was published some twenty years ago in Constantinople, entitled, Nesir-Eddin. It is a kind of jest-book, and contains many amusing things. The following Celestial jokes were translated from its...
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What is the meaning of "celestial" in this context? Does it mean Asian in general?Yes. It's from the old expession "Celestial Empire" = China (a translation of a Chinese term). OED cites: 1824-9...
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