Well pierce my ears and call me drafty
Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman discusses the pattern _change my state_ and call me _a name appropriate given the change_, and states
And I’m not sure whether the preposition (up or down in the cited examples) is obligatory or not.
He gives as examples:
…roll me up and call me curly…
…blow me down and call me shorty…
…dress me up and call me Sally…
…grease me up and call me slider…
The answer, as the title of this post demonstrates (7 gh), is that it’s not obligatory. I originally ran into the “pierce my ears” phrase as something that Hank McCoy (the bouncing blue Beast in the X-Men and Avengers comics) said, and fell in love with it. In fact, I see that one of the Google Hits was a post of mine on Foolippic in response to a Language Log post on “Dadburn it.”
Other examples (using the preposition in) are:
- well, roll me in sugar and call me doughy
- well, roll me in corn-flour and call me dinner (attributed to Foghorn Leghorn)
- well, roll me in shit and call me Daisy/stinky
- well, dip me in hot fudge and call me a sundae
- well, dip me in sugar and call me sweet-potato pie
- well, dip me in mucous and call me phlegmatic
And
- well, smack my ass/behind and call me Charley/Shirley/etc
- well, gyrate my pelvis and call me The King
- well, rub my chest and call me Vix
The “well, ” seems to be an important part of the phrase. Or maybe it just makes it easy to Google for.
January 26th, 2005 at 12:20 pm
From Carmen Jones, introducing a trio (quartet?) about catching a train to be with the boxer (toreador figure)
“Well, shut my mouth and call me dumb” [first man]
“And beat me, I’m a kettle drum” [second man]