The myth of Achilles, but instead of holding him by the heel, Thetis sumberges him fully so that Achilles is completely invulnerable and Thetis has one invulnerable hand.
She only needs one oven mitt when taking cookies out of the oven.
But there would still be two small parts of him that are vulnerable because they were covered by her fingertips at the time, stopping the water from touching them. Which means those fingertips are also vulnerable on her hand
Achilles *putting those little round band-aids on two parts of his ankle before battle*
Thetis *knitting fingertip oven mitts for her thumb and forefinger*
This is a Greek comedy I could get behind
What if she put him in a sack and dunked him in? The water would saturate the sack and soak him and so long as she pulled him out quick, he wouldn’t drown. Then they’d have a sack that’s invulnerable too and can be used as the most unexpected shield ever.
Imagine Achilles storming Troy with one (1) invulnerable sack for a shield
thetis just sticks him in one of these bad boys
and swirls him around like a batch of chicken nuggets until he’s invulnerable all over.
Meanwhile, “utter” works for the first (e.g., “you utter floorboard”) but somehow “utterly” doesn’t seem to work as well for the second (“I was utterly floorboarded”).
Utterly doesn’t work for drunk because it’s the affix for turning random objects into terms for *shocked*, obviously.
… huh. I thought that might just be the similarity to “floored”, and yet “I was utterly coat hangered” does seem to convey something similar.
I have to tell you, I am utterly sandwiched at this discovery.
Completely makes the phrase mean “super tired”.
“God, it’s been a long week, I am completely coat-hangered.”
Something is
Something is wrong with our language
Is it a glitch or a feature?
Feature
this neat feature is called collocative substitution, and it occurs when certain words are strongly linked to certain context and/or phrases. when you read/hear a pair of words that usually wouldn’t go together, your brain fills in the context with what would normally be inferred, given the originally phrased pairing. thus, finding out that there’s a term for this phenomenon may indeed leave you utterly sandwiched. lesser known or less strongly linked phrases and pairings may not be able to translate substituted words to appropriately fit the inferred context, so you were not utterly floorboarded at the club last night, but rather you were absolutely floorboarded, and as this explanation continues to drag on, you may by the end of it find yourself completely coathangered from read it all.
I, like all linguists I have met or even heard of, have a deep intricate love-hate relationship with the English Language because of complete and total coathangering like this