The youngster feigned innocence, saying he was looking for a hook to go fishing with a friend at a promising fishing spot nearby. That is, although you can talk about a dishonest politician, you can't talk about your *alight trousers, or your *aboard passengers, *afraid children, *atwitter crowds, or *astride riders. I also found repeated, numerous times, a completely bogus origin of the phrase. The reason we don't talk about *afire trousers is the same reason that we don't talk about *on fire pants: Prepositional phrases as a rule come after the nouns they modify, not before them.
You can use it as a complement of a linking verb, as in Your candidate is dishonest, or They all seem dishonest. One recent British English meaning for pants that Freeman doesn't mention is "utter rubbish", which Michael Quinion discusses on his World Wide Words website . Trousers, on the other hand, came from an Irish word in the late 16th century, already referring to legwear.
", Looking into the history of the expression "pants on fire," I found a blog post from etymologist Barry Popik on the subject. Neal Whitman blogs at Literal-Minded, where he writes about linguistics in everyday life from the point of view of a husband and father. … Then he swiftly turned the boy over his knee and whacked his behind, extinguishing the danger. Adjectives such as alight can be used predicatively, too, as in Your trousers are alight! ", and (inspired by Pinocchio, one assumes) "Your nose is long as a telephone wire!" Standard warning: don’t tattoo this on your body without consulting a professional. A: "No, my mom is really a magical princess, I swear! Take an adjective, such as dishonest. B: "Liar, liar, pants on fire—I saw you take it from Mom's purse this morning! But by 1588 they had fallen together enough to produce theOED's first attestation of the pun "lie like a dog."
One of the definitions in the entry for "pants on fire" in The Urban Dictionary is relevant: pants on fire 1. to lie so badly that, theoretically your pants will burst into flames. Walter B. McKenzie/The Image Bank/Getty Images. In other words, on fire and afire share not only their meaning, but also their syntax. All the English adjectives that begin with this unstressed a-, including ablaze and afire, as well as non-incendiary members such as aboard, afraid, atwitter, and astride, lack an ability that the most typical adjectives have. Wikipedia lists variants that have "Your belt's hanging on the telephone wire! Or is it? Appears to be a biblical reference, yet combined with a much earlier childish taunt “liar, liar, dish-lick”(picture a dog's tongue rapidly lapping up food from a plate for that last part). But you wouldn't have known that from the newspapers or radio news reports, because the Politifact ranking they always reported was the falser-than-false, crank-it-up-to-11 ranking of "Pants on Fire!". Like liar/deceiver/dissembler and pants/trousers, these two terms share a meaning, but unlike the other pairings, these two have different parts of speech. Another possible origin for "Liar, liar pants on fire" is that it was derived from a poem written in 1810 by William Blake, titled "The Liar." It, too, was inspired by Politifact's ranking system. You can use it as a complement of a linking verb, as in Your candidate is dishonest, or They all seem dishonest. But you wouldn't have known that from the newspapers or radio news reports, because the Politifact ranking they always reported was the falser-than-false, crank-it-up-to-11 ranking of "Pants on Fire!". I don't think the missing articles in "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" are due to the speaker's Russian heritage.
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