Strips
Reddit
MySpace
Google
Ask
del.icio.us
Slashdot
Twitter
Facebook
Yahoo Bookmarks
Yahoo Web
Digg
Technorati
close
close
COPY TO CLIPBOARD
Comments
+4
Sep 21, 2012
I think there are two take-aways from this discussion:(1) PHB's idioms, despite the mixed one, are quite widely-known in North American English. ('Screwed the pooch' may be a little less common, but I've barely seen a political discussion in years in Canada or the U.S. that didn't involve someone getting 'thrown under the bus'.)
(2) Despite being common to a relatively large region, they are nonetheless regional, and so widely *unknown* to those not native to North American English.
Which makes the comic particularly plausible - the idioms are not particularly esoteric, and not at all surprising that PHB would use them, yet with Asok's foreign charm not surprising that he might not pick up on them.
On a related note...only 4 stars? This is one of the few comics that literally made me laugh out loud when I hit the punchline.
+33
Sep 21, 2012
@ sanddmon re: "2) It would seem that Asok's research led him to a definition leaning more towards the meaning of "Choked the chicken" - hence his guilty disposition in the third frame."Surely, Asok's guilt in frame 3 is due to fact that he, quite literally, threw Carl under a bus, as ordered to by the PHB?
+7
Sep 21, 2012
I was talking to some coworkers in the USA about an issue and said, 'well there is more than one way to skin the cat.' Man they started laughing! They were not orginally from here I think but had been here a long long time and that idiom wsa not known to them... they thought I was crazzzy!
+13
Sep 21, 2012
I feel compelled to explain the reference to the dog. Think of a dark room, a "significant other", and a case of mistaken identity. The expression originally meant to do something that seemed right at the time but that turned out to be terribly wrong. Now, it just means to make a serious mistake...
+11
Sep 21, 2012
"Choke the pooch" just sounds so wrong. It had to be bowdlerized to get past the editors, but it just doesn't have the same ring as the original.
