Tickling the ivories... or, something like that
My sister Karen is hilarious. Part of her endearingly innocent sense of humor (her name means purity, after all) is that she has an uncanny knack for coming up with the funniest malapropisms and non-sequiturs... sorry: the funniest made-up words and misused phrases. During a recent visit, she told me about two separate occasions when she didn't quite succeed in describing the act of playing the piano. Instead of using the well-known phrase "tickling the ivories", she first said "tinkling the ivories" and then offered "tickling the pearly whites." Since tinkling often refers to a certain bodily function, and pearly whites usually means teeth, we both had a good laugh thinking about Karen's friends imagining her "tinkling on the pearly whites". hey, at least she didn't say pearly gates.
posted by GtotheMizzo @ 11:06 PM
2 Comments:
that's hilarious! i'm still laughing out loud as I type this.
ah yes, hosey cone. that was actually a greg-ism that Karen picked up. I went through a phase in elementary school of talking in "baby-talk" for comic effect, basically just dropping r's and making my voice sound funny. the term hosey cone referred to that trick where you ask someone if they know how a "horse eats corn", and then you squeeze right above their knee, which tickles most people (except my annoyingly unticklish spouse). so I would pronounce that hosey cone, and Karen thought that's how you really say it. I'm pretty sure she still says it that way--so it's big brother's fault for ruining her vocabulary. actually she's grown into a brilliant, well-spoken young woman, so I guess the damage was minimal.
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