Connect
Sponsors
Currently Reading
-
Terms
The Book Lady's Blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Reviews and articles posted here are property of The Book Lady's Blog and are not to be posted elsewhere without permission. Please contact me if you wish to post any of my work, or any excerpt thereof, in any other location or format.
Miscellaneous
Meet Bookrageous!
Technical Stuff
Design Credits
Nov
25
Running amok with rocky mountain oysters (Phraseology, day 18)
2008 at 11am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
This happens to be one of my favorite letters of the alphabet, since my name starts with it, and I’m pretty happy with the fun Phraseology facts I’ve selected to share with you today.
Let’s start with some fun vocabulary.
Did you know that a rain gauge is also known as a pluviometer?
Or that the risorius of Santorini is the muscle of facial expression running from the parotid fascia to the corner of the mouth, whose action draws out the angle of the mouth?
The earliest rat pack was the Holmby Hills Rat Pack of Hollywood, consisting of Humphrey Bogart and his drinking buddies. What’s your preference: rat pack or brat pack?
The first real McCoy was a sewing machine.
Rice paper has no rice in it.
Some common R-related redundancies:
-
reason why and “the reason is because”
-
refer back
-
revert back
-
rest and relaxation
Also, rarely ever is literally nonsensical.
The figurative phrase run amuck or run amok comes from a psychiatric disease calling mengamok in which a man can go crazy and start killing others. Never heard of that one before.
Rocky mountain oysters are bull or ram testicles boiled and then sliced into ovals and fried, usually served with a spicy sauce. I don’t know about you, but there’s no amount of sauce in the world that could convince me to eat those. If you did decide to be adventurous and make them, you might need to use a runcible spoon–a three-pronged fork curved like a spoon and used as a serving utensil. That sounds an awful lot like a spork to me….kinda looks like one, too.
This Friday is Black Friday, which is a great day for a little retail therapy—shopping as a leisure activity or comfort; also called shopping therapy. It’s especially therapeutic if you have a run-in with a crazy relative at Thanksgiving dinner and end up getting the rubber ear, which is synonymous with the cold shoulder.
Hope you’re having a great week. Click here for more fun Phraseology facts you can use to impress your friends and family at Thanksgiving dinner….if they’re in to that sort of thing.
Related posts:
Hands down, I’m for the brat pack over the rat pack. Perhaps it’s the era I grew up in and my love for Molly Ringwald. (I’m even into keeping up with “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” where she plays the mom.)
Now I want to go watch Sixteen Candles. “You know everyone in this family has gone total outer limits.”
)
I can’t wait to indulge in some retail therapy this weekend!
My dad wants to hit the mall around 7 a.m., and then I’ve been called in to work at the bookstore from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. My triumphant (brief) return to retail is on Black Friday! Oh, the injustice of it all! 
I love the rhinoceros of Santini the best (sometimes my eyes get ahead of my brain). Thank you so much for your generosity!