Re: Someone said, recently...

On Sun, 12 Feb 2006 14:08:35 -0000, R J Valentine <rj@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sun, 12 Feb 2006 22:23:15 +1100 Peter Moylan <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

} Maria Conlon wrote:
}> At the next table in a restaurant:
}>
}> "Built like a brick shithouse" in referring to a man. I'd only heard
}> it in reference to women before. The speaker was a Brit.
}
} In my dialect that phrase means "exceptionally strong". I have some
} difficulty imagining anyone applying it to a woman. Well, perhaps an
} Olympic-level weight lifter, or one of those body-building champions
} who have bumps in all the wrong places, but those are extreme
} cases.

Here it means "sturdily built" or "stocky". I've mentioned before that in
the little park around the spillway of Brighton Dam (the
second-downstreamest [= PGE "penultimate"] dam on the mighty Patuxent
River (known far and wide as the border between 301 and 410, since
Baltimore lost its rightful 301 (its dialing twin (DC) having retained
its 202)) there is or was a demonstration building made of small blocks
made from sewage sludge.

But that is clearly a "built of shit-brick house".

(ObDrift: early area codes were assigned by
correlating population or importance with clicks on a rotary dial, so New
York of course had 212, lesser big cities got 213 and 312, and so on. I
don't think that the Fourth Largest Metropolian Area in America had yet
been erected, and in any case area codes tend not to cross state lines,
except for like National Airport and Bedloes Island. [Next up: Crossbar
switches.])


--
Jim
a Yorkshire polymoth
.

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