As Stupid as a Fox
Thanks to the linguistics exam being as easy as a pie (which made me think of a czech simile roughly translated as "as easy as a slap" - why can't we have some nice simile involving sweets instead of violence?) I am now free to enjoy some pleasant things like going to the cinema and the already mentioned thinking about similes.
Have you ever heard of someone being "as stupid as a fox" or "stupid like a fox"? I haven't, but I saw this in Roman Dirge's Lenore some time ago and it keeps appearing in my head every time I try to think about similes, so I decided that I would find out if it really exists or not.
What I found was that it probably doesn't, Google doesn't say anything except for the query "What does 'stupid as a fox mean?'" I even tried the British National Corpus and you know what that means... using stuff I've learned in real life, hell yeah!
But let's put my research failure aside. If the simile existed, what would it mean? Foxes aren't stupid, are they? They're pretty cunning. That must mean that somebody stupid like a fox is not stupid at all. Which is what makes this even more hilarous:
(source: Roman Dirge - Cooties.) - nah, I'm too lazy to quote in MLA :)
2 comments:
Well this one is really tricky! But good job, Roman Dirge, this is a very nice piece of work with language :-). It's actually reverting the simile "as cunning as a fox" and I am really glad that this one is the same in Czech because I like it a lot!
And, of course, good job, Trollkona, because I did not have any idea that this reverted simile has beeen ever used! :-)
yeah it is the opposite of cunning as a fox.. I should have probably mentioned that ^^ btw everytime I see "similes" I read it as "smiles" - simile is just one hell of a weird word :)
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