radleyas said:

Fish or cut bait. What does it mean, exactly? Stop fishing and cut your line, or stop fishing and do something else useful, like cutting bait?

As I understand this phrase, it means to "either do it, or give up". It's, in my mind, identical to "sh*t or get off the pot". I've lived all over the country and have used this phrase in that way in so many states. I've always been understood.

The main character in the movie "Trixie", played by Emily Watson, is a detective given to muddled language. In one of her first speeches of the film, she tells someone he should "either fish or get off the pot".

I too have been guilty of declaring something "a good question", but that means I have some insight into what it is that elicits such a response. When I'm teaching a class or giving a presentation, I have a set of topics that I need to address, and a rough idea of how I'm going to get from one topic to the next. Some of those transitions are smoother than others, and if someone happens to ask a question at the appropriate moment that will lead nicely into the next point, that not only makes it easier for me, but may well make the subject matter easier for the audience to follow, and it tells me that what I've presented up to that point has the questioner thinking along the same lines as my talk.

Not that there's anything wrong with a simple "I don't quite understand what you mean by X", but when a question has benefits in three distinct areas, I think it's worth acknowledging the fact.

If someone says, "That's a good question," do you find it annoying or insincere?

I've heard the "that's a good question" line many times used to mean "I was hoping you'd ask that so I can say something I wanted to say anyway" but on a few occasions I've heard people actually using it to express a happy surprise when someone asks a question that the person had never considered before; that's the most honest use of the phrase.

Post edited 6:40PM – Apr-13-10 by separator

Re: fish or cut bait: Grant and Martha, along with the caller, seemed to be a bit wrapped around the axle trying to parse the phrase too literally. While it can certainly be used that way, the caller was talking about a discussion he was having with his friend that seemed to be unable to reach resolution. This is the case with most uses of this phrase (IMHO), in that it infers that whatever is being concentrated upon should get busy proceeding to resolution, or it should be dropped altogether and something else should be engaged. It is more of an allusionary phrase (if allusionary is a word) and less intended to be used literally.

Also, re: off-kilter phrasing: my son's band director used a similar device. When trying to get across the point that a certain thing should be simply achieved, he'd say, "Hey, it's not rocket surgery."

My $0.02.

"cut bait" – Reminds me of an old joke:
Rumor was that someone was fishing by throwing live dynamite into the lake, then collecting the dead fish that floated to the surface. The local game warden (dressed in plain clothes) convinced the suspect to go fishing in a boat together.
Out on the lake, the suspect lit a stick of dynamite. The warden immediately started to tell him, "I'm the game warden, and you are under arrest…"
The suspect handed him the dynamite and said, "Did you come here to talk, or to fish?"

As I listened to the discussion about its and it's I was wondering if it 's a chicken or an egg thing, which came first the 's possessive or the ' for a contraction.

RE: morbid fascination

Lit crit/philosophy people actually have a word for it: "abjection" as used by the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva in her book "Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection". Here is a short but very, shall I say, evocative quote (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, transl. Leon S. Roudiez).

Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and protects me from defilement, sewage and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them.

The whole book is rather heavy-going for those not used to psychoanalytic jargon, but responds to your listener's question, I think, quite precisely.

And of course Plato addressed the same issue (but without naming it) with his famous story in Republic about Leontius:

Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was going up from the Piraeus along the outside of the North Wall when he saw some corpses lying at the executioners feet. He had an appetite to look at them but at the same time he was disgusted and turned away. For a time he struggled with himself and covered his face, but, finally overpowered by the appetite, he pushed his eyes wide open and rushed towards the corpses, saying, “Look for yourselves, you evil wretches, take your fill of the beautiful sight.

Post edited 4:15PM – Apr-30-10 by Bill 5

re: Galloping Goose

The expression "It'll never be seen on a galloping horse" means "Don't be such a perfectionist." But why? A caller remembers an even odder version: It'll never be seen on a galloping goose.

I was surprised you went in the direction of machinery that was unreliable for galloping goose. I had seen some of the original Galloping Geese (Is it Gooses if it's a proper noun??) years ago at the Colorado Railroad Museum, and just saw another one at Knott's Berry Farm last weekend. (They gave a behind-the-scenes tour of their steam railroad "roundhouse" to the Boy Scouts as part of railroading merit badge. By the way, their roundhouse is a rectangular cube.)

They were buses (originally Buick sedans) modified to run on the narrow gauge rails in the Colorado mountains so the Rio Grande Southern could cheaply keep their US Mail contract when ridership dropped off to too few to pay for a full steam train. A gas or diesel motor railcar could do the minimal job much, much cheaper than a steam locomotive, as long as there wasn't a lot of ore to haul.

Wikipedia has a brief, but good article here. (Grant, I was sure you would have checked at least this!)

And here is Wikipedia's explanation for the name sounds more likely to me. (Though, of course, we all know Wikipedia has both the greatest amount of correct information and the greatest amount of myth & disinformation all collected in one place!)

It is unclear exactly where the name "Galloping Goose" comes from. It is mostly commonly suggested that it referred to the way the carbody and the freight compartment tended to rock back and forth on the line's sometimes precarious track. It is also suggested, though, that the name arose because the "geese" were equipped with air horns rather than the whistles of the steam locomotives. The name was used informally for years before the tourist operations, though the railroad officially referred to the units as "motors".

I was watching a BBC series from a few years back on DVD recently, The Vicar of Dibley. One of the characters (a gruff farmer) was describing someone whose competence was not up to snuff and described him as "a few teats short of an udder". It made me laugh and reminded me of this past episode with "pickles short of a jar", so thought I would share.

In an earlier episode, a caller named Todd said that people are forever calling him Scott. He wondered if there was some linguistic reason that people so often confused these names. Grant does a follow-up on why people sometimes mix up names.

I have a personal theory on this. As a little backstory, I used to work in a call-center with lots of downtime and a few employees would collaborate to play a game that "mined" larger words for smaller words found therein made from the letters (and their frequency) from within that larger word. In the process of developing my pen-and-paper strategy for finding more words faster, I separated vowels and consonants into two horizontal rows, with vowels lined up below consonants, so I could flip flop up and down to make new combinations. We played the game for several years, never growing weary of it, and in the process I inadvertently trained myself to notice the patterns of vowels to consonants within words, as a technique of determining whether a larger word contained a fewer or greater number of words, or its eligibility for use in the game. I came to realize that I also remembered peoples' names because of the vowel-consonant pattern, so when Katheryn was confused with Margaret, it immediately made perfect sense to me because the vowel-consonant pattern is practically identical.

MARGARET
KATHERYN

As for Scott and Todd, I propose that it may be the double-consonant ending where the confusion comes in. I know way more Scotts than Todds, and if remembering that it ended in a double consonant (being rather, a double of the same letter) I'd quicker suggest Scott than Todd.

A San Francisco man confesses he routinely pronounces the word "both" as "bolth." Grant gives him the results of an informal online survey that shows the caller he's not alone—some 10 percent of respondents said they do the same thing.

I have heard people pronounce it that way, but it never occurred to me that people saying it that way inserted an L. What I hear is that someone from, perhaps the Minnesota region, who say "Don'tcha know" with "o" found in "fork" (and perhaps pronounce "Minnesota" similarly). I've heard that particular "o" sound, but never presumed it to be an insertion of and L sound at all. The first time I encountered "bolth" was within the last year, when a commenter on one of my YouTube videos actually wrote it out as "bolth" instead of the traditional spelling.