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Carpal Tunnel
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Jack London, in one of his short stories, (To Build a Fire?) spoke about the cold in the yukon -- and spoke of informal thermometers, such as it being cold enough for a wad of spite to freeze into a ball before it hit the ground, or of urine freezing before it hit the ground.. maybe this belongs in the "how cold is it thread"..
and Mc Phee (First name?) a writer for The NYer, wrote about the cold of his childhood, and how once his diapered brother was frozen to the floor when he wet himself.
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Was there a "Susie" with you at the time? The "brick outhouse" comments do not seem to provide much elucidation, do they? But the meaning of the phrase "built like a brick s**t house does provoke interest, does it not, Maverick? BTW, what "bidding gadgets" were you talking about when you sent me your welcoming email. BTW, Pluto is a planet. I'm Plutarch.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Joined: Sep 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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No way, dubbledub! The essence is not the *roof, pitched or otherwise: the sense of the simile lies in the solidity, in the slab-sidedness, in the sheer *mass of its BRICK contruction! It's gotta be a male thang!  Hey, Plut, it was just an arch joke  - and I thought you played Bridge? In answer to your query, no, I had a complete absence of Susie on my person at the time I was so accosted - I don't know Susie like my friend knows Susie. The phrase came out at me out of left field in Kentucky.
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Joined: Feb 2001
Posts: 387
enthusiast
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enthusiast
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Does this subject line worry anyone else?
OK, go murder the duke, and I'll escape to France and see what I can do to those infernal musketeers
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Carpal Tunnel
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Now out here in Virginia, we only refer to these referenced structures as outhouses. The expletive part I've never heard in polite, country conversation. (Or impolite, come to think of it.)
To this ear, the former ("outhouse") is a polite and somewhat effete euphemism, the latter being the basic form.
Possibly WW and I differ on this because men are more given to euphemistic speech-forms when ladies, like WW, are present. ("When nature is calling, plain speaking is out / If ladies, lord love 'em, are milling about.") Perhaps this is a simple case of the familiar maxim, "Circumstances alter cusses."
"brick" __-house, implying: She's also got her feet firmly planted, if not on, in the ground. She's unshakable. ... Mae West comes to mind.
Here the analogy breaks down a bit. Mae's persona was unshakable but, unlike a brick structure, was emphatically not untippable.
In short, the name "Mae" was descriptive.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Speaking of tippable or untippable in relation to outhouses, my father-in-law used to recall the dear old days of yore when the night before Holloween was called "mischief night" or "moving night" when all the youths in a neighborhood would participate in pranks such as unfastening the neighbors' gates and pitching them on the porch roof, taking away the ashcans, and tipping over outhouses, of which there were still plenty in back yards even in the city. They apparently used to get away with stuff that would land modern young people in reform school.
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That's cuz they didn't have reform schools in those days, BobY. A "mischief night" was just that. Mischief one night a year. Now we have muggers and miscreants running loose night and day.  "The good ole days" really were the good ole days, BobY.
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