Deborah in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, remembers a phrase from her grandfather: Desperate Ambrose. He’s so desperate he would steal a hot stove. The first part is a reference to Desperate Ambrose, a character in the comic strip “S’Matter Pop?,” by cartoonist Charles Payne, which ran from about 1910 to 1940. The Lambiek Comiclopedia is a good resource for information about comic strips. The description of someone who would steal a hot stove goes back to the 1860s, and emphasizes the idea of someone being a thieving rascal. Playwright Wilson Mizner is credited with elaborating on that phrase, describing someone so desperate that they would steal a hot stove and come back for the smoke. This is part of a complete episode.
If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
There are many proposed origins for the exclamation of surprise, holy Toledo! But the most likely one involves not the city in Ohio, but instead Toledo, Spain, which has been a major religious center for centuries in the traditions of both Islam and...
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