rape the ear
v. phr.— «A familiar sound of summer was in the air: a crisply abrasive stripping noise, the sound of husks being torn away from fat cobs of white corn. Two or three shoppers were depositing pale-green husks and shimmery strands of corn silk into a 33-gallon trashcan, placed near the corn display to catch the detritus.…But some maize gurus have another name for such acts of convenience. “’Raping the ear’ is what we call it,” says Betty Fussell, author of The Story of Corn. The writer has a healthy contempt for in-store husking. “The husk is the world’s best sealant, like a Ziploc,” she explains. “Once you lose that, you start losing all that lovely moisture.” Fussell says most shoppers don’t even know why they do it: “I think a lot of it is ritual.”» —“Summer Strip Club” by John Birdsall East Bay Express (Emeryville, California) June 13, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
A listener named Lita who grew up in Cuba shares her favorite Spanish idiom for “working hard”: sudando tinta, or literally, “sweating ink.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Sweating Ink” We had a voicemail from Lita Longa and she...
A 1905 letter from Virginia Woolf offers comfort to anyone who lacks confidence in their own work. As a young, would-be writer, Woolf herself expressed doubt about her own abilities. It would be another 23 years before she published her...