I’ll Tickle Your Catastrophe

You may be asking why I used valuable time to do this. The answer, as it frequently happens to be, is “procrastination!!!” Well, that and the strange feeling that the end of this one line of Falstaff’s from Henry IV — “Away, you scullion! you rampallian! you fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe” — sounds remarkably more like a Belle & Sebastian lyric than an actual threat. Hence…

In a column on Shakespearean insults, Angela Tung says this use of catastrophe refers to the butt, but Falstaff is actually threatening to kick the addressee’s bottom, not tickle his anus. Just FYI.

Original llama image via.

Funny Little Brazilian Frog

If you told me I was going to receive a frog-related email, I would have assumed it would be about the Scrotum Frog. Nope.

Hello,

I saw a post on your blog, “funny little frog,” and I was wondering if it means something, like an expression. I’m Brazilian, and I am asking this because of a Belle & Sebastian song called “Funny Little Frog.” I'm trying to figure what it means.

Thanks,

Sérgio from Brazil

I love that this blog allows people to send me these kinds of emails, scrotum-related or not. I told my new friend Sérgio that the Bell & Sebastian song mentioned in this post title doesn’t refer to any English idiom that I know if, aside from our cute tendency to refer to gurgly phlegm as “a frog in the throat.” It doesn’t mean anything else, does it?

Frogs, previously:

• The Toad That Was Not a Rock
• A Frog in the Salad Bag
• Displeased Frog
• The Frog I Met in Australia
• Long Live the Frog King