Thursday, August 11, 2005

Alligator Mouth, Hummingbird Rump

Gil Thorp from August 11, 2005
The extremely bad comic strip Gil Thorp had a teen-age jock character call the guy threatening him for trying to date his ex-wife (don't bother trying to parse that, the strip is not worth it) as being "all bluster. Alligator mouth, humming bird rump." From the context where it's used, the phrase seems to mean someone is all talk. Equivalent to "all bark, no bite" or "all hat, no cattle."

The folks over at the College don't think that's the way a real teenager would talk, so I did a little google searching and came up with the following results:

Fun with Google®:

  • "alligator mouth" and "hummingbird ass" - 632 hits including at least one rap song
  • "alligator mouth" and "hummingbird butt" - 170 hits
  • "alligator mouth" and "hummingbird rear end" - 42 hits
  • "alligator mouth" and "hummingbird rump" - 0 hits

It seems no one, teen-ager or otherwise, talks like that. Obviously the writer is using a euphemism that does not naturally fit with that phrase. This is a great opportunity to experiment frack with Google. I am going to challenge the College to try to up that hit count by posting that phrase on other websites and check back in a week to see if this meme has taken root.

Check the current count.

If you want to play along at home, post on your website, or someone else's (as long as you play nice), the phrase "alligator mouth, hummingbird rump", preferably in a meaningful context. Just don't start any flame wars. Remember the key word is "rump" since "ass", "butt", and "rear end" are already well represented here. Link back to here, leave a comment and I will try to list the other places where it appears.

Also, I have added as a technorati tag for whatever good that does.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey yello!

Having fun with this, posting comments including the phrase at several blogs:

The Royal Flush:
http://theroyalflush.blogspot.com/
Kerfuffles:
http://kerfuffles.blogspot.com/
Blogs for Condi:
http://condoleezza.blogspot.com/
Right Side of the Rainbow:
http://rightrainbow.com/
This Blog is Full of Crap:
http://www.isfullofcrap.com/

And a Harry Potter discussion website:
http://www.leakylounge.com/

Thanks for a little Thursday afternoon fun!

Lor

yellojkt said...

Thanx Lor! That's the spirit.

Anonymous said...

Hey, umm . . . yelljkt, the count is still zero, though I myself have posted the phrase several times already. Are you sure that Google searches through blogs and blog comments? If not, we'll need a better plan.

yellojkt said...

First google sighting thanks to Lor:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A//isfullofcrap.com/oldcrap/2005/08/not_quite_a_fai.html&ei=9RH9QtfKMLzc4QHT1IE0

Anonymous said...

never mind

Viagra Online said...

Sometimes, authors use euphemisms in order to give it an emphasis to the same word. Like saying "the'F' word", you know? I think that was the case here.

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Yeah this is a nice action comic I really like it, thanks for share, I hope someday they start to gif comics on the street.

e111 said...

good read

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