Tone of voice or twinkle of eye can turn insult into friendly banter, and vice versa. As the much-misquoted line from Chapter 2 of Owen Wister's The Virginian goes, "When you call me that, Smile." A friend at the office once described those of us, chained to our desks, who missed a luncheon as "Pitiful Losers". We understood. More recently a language maven in the family heard a new idiom used by a comrade to express sympathy with someone in a bad situation:
| "So sucky to be you!" |
TopicLanguage - TopicHumor - 2003-12-08
(correlates: KillTheProject, FactorAndFactotum, HelloSailor, ...)