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Word Smith: Anything-dog

Despite all of the cat videos out there, these days you can add the suffix “dog” to nearly anything and it finds welcomed acceptance in our urban vernacular. You can add it as a prefix also, but that is less accepted, as in Dog, You Dog You.

Below are a few hot diggity dog references for the canine deprived out there.

Hound dog

Snoop dogg

  • Re-defining and re-spelling rap music in America; and there are many copy cats of this dog(g).

Hot dog

  • Boog Powell was the ultimate show-off, with his biceps bulging. “Powell, you hot dog,” was shouted by tons of fans at Memorial Stadium, when Boog came to bat as a clean-up hitter in the 1960’s. Now you could say, “Powell, you bar-b-que-dog.”

Shoe dog

  • Shoe dogs were people who devoted themselves wholly to the making, selling, buying, or designing of shoes. Lifers used the phrase cheerfully to describe other lifers, men and women who had toiled so long and hard in the shoe trade, they thought and talked about nothing else. It was an all-consuming mania, a recognizable psychological disorder, to care so much about insoles and outsoles, linings and welts, rivets and vamps. Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight, page 186.

Sly dog

Service-Dog to the Rescue

  • Clever dude, who gets away with murder and more. Sneaky, winking, smiling, cajoling canine behavior.

Mad dogs (and Englishmen)

  • As Noel Coward in his fractured rhyme-way proclaimed, “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun”…or so his song says…Joe Cocker and Leon Russell picked up on that theme many years later.
  • Now with Brexit, who will venture into the scorching light first? Man or dog?

In tropical climes there are certain times of day
When all the citizens retire
To tear their clothes off and perspire
It’s one of those rules that the greatest fools obey
Because the sun is much too sultry
And one must avoid its ultra violet ray
Papalaka papalaka papalaka boo
Papalaka papalaka papalaka boo
Digariga digariga digariga doo
Digariga digariga digariga doo
The native grieve when the white
Men leave their huts, because
They’re obviously definitely nuts!
Mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun
The Japanese don’t care to
The Chinese wouldn’t dare to
Hindoos and Argentines sleep
Firmly from twelve to one
But Englishmen detest a siesta…

Walk the dog

  • More than-daily task any canine owner must do so that their furry pet doesn’t make a mess in your house.
  • A Yoyo trick that will impress your friends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c74H0oOIg1A
  • By the way, the yoyo was probably invented by the ancient Greeks or Chinese, as it has been around as entertainment for centuries.

Not my dog

  • Favorite punch line from Peter Sellers in a Pink Panther movie.
  • Used several times in Clousseau movies to humorous effect.

Shoot this dog

  • Speaks for itself…sort of.
  • Advertising genius or lunacy? You decide.
  • National Lampoon was always on the edge of irreverence and loved offending everyone, even dog lovers.

Don’t shoot the dog

  • Worth a read for all aspiring teachers and trainers.

Dog daze

  • Bring it on, baby! It’s party time.

Rabid dog

  • Don’t mess with me
  • Get a rabies shot, you dog, you.

Dog eat dog

  • “It’s dog eat dog they say.
    Cat ate a rat, it ran away.
    There’s no other way, they say.”
  • The definition of dog eat dog is something or some situation in which there is fierce, ruthless competition.
  • An example of dog eat dog is a competitive sales environment where everyone is trying to beat out their co-workers to make the most sales, even if they have to lie and cheat to do it.

Dog tired

  • Pooped as a puppy.

Doggone it

  • Doggone 1851, Amer.Eng., a “fantastic perversion of god-damned” [Weekley]. But H.L. Mencken favors the theory that it is “a blend form of dog on it; in fact it is still often used with it following. It is thus a brother to the old English phrase, ‘a pox upon it,’ but is considerably more decorous.”

K-9 Police Dawg

Raining cats and dogs

  • Image by Kevin Cox
  • It’s a doggy dog world; cats added gratuitously.
  • nuff said.

Puttin’ on the dog

  • A popular gaffe is “putting on the dog,” which the Williamsburg booklet says came from a colonial custom of making shoes or gloves out of dog skin. The cost of leather from Mother England was so high, due to tariffs, the colonists chose to use dog hide as a cheaper and precious alternative; it wore out quickly. That sounds like a fascinating fact from our pre-Revolutionary past, but research in the Oxford English Dictionary shows the expression is no older than the 1860’s and probably traces to wealthy people with lapdogs. An 1871 reminiscence titled Four Years at Yale demonstrates that the phrase had already become college slang. The book says: “To put on dog is to make a flashy display, to cut a swell.” Note written by James Breig.
  • In the Urban Dictionary, “‘Put on (the) dog’ means ‘to make a display of wealth or importance, especially by dressing stylishly and flashily’. It’s similar in meaning to the expression ‘put on the Ritz.'”