Dirty,
Those are pretty good and we gotta have humor to help swallow apostrophes.
Sunlover

Here is a link to a great graphical web page explaining the complexities of apostrophe for more visually oriented writers:

theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe

(since I cannot post live links you have to add an "http://" to the front of that to make it work...)

Rectitude is pretty damn funny too...maybe its the three or four juxtapositions...

The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

And the winners are:

1.Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.

2.Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.

3.Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4.Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.

5.Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.

6.Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.

7.Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.

8.Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.

9.Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.

10.Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.

11.Testicle, n.. A humorous question on an exam.

12.Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

13.Pokemon, n.. A Rastafarian proctologist.

14.Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

15.Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

16.Circumvent, n. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

Love it!

Pail - Pale

and not the whitish color. The frequent misuse is in the phrase "beyond the pale" (correct) - "beyond the pail" (incorrect - that's just the other side of a bucket).

ok - got it - 20 posts, then bingo

Can someone give me a quick tip on how you code the gifs here? I am used to doing it as follows:

<a target='_blank' href=''><img src='' border='0'/></a>

but the preview only shows the code and not the gif.
Thanks,
Sunlover

Where did some of our favorite cliched phrases come from? Sometimes you can give even a worn out cliche some new and interesting life in a story if you know something about its provenance.

I'll start with "piss poor" and the related "not a pot to piss in".

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken and sold to the tannery . . . if you had to do this to survive.....you were “piss poor”

But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn’t even afford to buy a pot . . . they “didn’t have a pot to
piss in” and were the lowest of the low.

Do you have a good one to contribute?

Her mother elicited from her every last bit of information about the illicit relationship.

I second the concept of the earlier post that we should distinguish between the narrative and the dialog. The phrase being used incorrectly in dialog may be exactly what the writer intends in order to show us more about the character in the story. Think of Italian mafioso dialog in the Godfather movies as just one of many examples.