Puzzle #97: Twice-baked Idioms
Each of the seven sentences below twice reference the same English idiom: once figuratively, once literally. Figure out the idiom in each one.
Standard rules apply: please only solve for one, so more people get a shot at answer. Thanks.
1.
When Felix spontaneously jumped out of Schrodinger’s backpack, the secret of his experiment was finally revealed.
2.
Three years later, Pete was still angry about that time his brother dumped an entire Pringles can on him from above.
3.
While floating in his inner tube, Alex felt a tug on his foot, only to quickly realize it was his friend, just pretending.
4.
“Whoops, I didn’t mean to drop that,” said Michael Jordan as he picked up the pieces of broken dinnerware set.
5.
As Jimmy stood awaiting his mafia execution, he regretted that he never got to fulfill his one dream of taking a nap in the big shark tank.
6.
Chef Charlie made a fabulous, explosive Bananas Foster, but it wasn’t enough to keep him around the restaurant for more than a week.
7.
The manager of the zoo supply store couldn’t keep bananas in stock because his surly teenage stock boy kept pocketing them.
When I first heard [Duncan] described as a “master palindromist,” I imagined, briefly, some sort of governing body with an esoteric ranking structure, doling out titles like “grandmaster” in chess. But no. For Duncan the title is self-proclaimed. “When I say I’m a master palindromist, there are two answers for what that means,” he explained. “One is that it means, when it comes to palindrome-writing, I know what I’m doing. The other, slightly longer, slightly more combative answer is that it means you shouldn’t confuse me with any of those garden-variety, ‘Madam I’m Adam’ hacks who couldn’t paint my shadow.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
In 1972, William Rapaport composed the above grammatically correct sentence. If you’re having trouble parsing it — and why wouldn’t you, for it seems to be lacking in many of the features we normally associate with, you know, English — head over to its Wikipedia page, which breaks it down. First thing to note is that “buffalo” can be interpreted three ways:
- a. the city of Buffalo, New York, which is used as a noun adjunct in the sentence and is followed by the animal;
- n. the noun buffalo, an animal, in the plural (equivalent to “buffaloes” or “buffalos”), in order to avoid articles;
- v. the verb ”buffalo” meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate.
I assure you, by the time you’re done reading the article, the word “buffalo” will cease to have any meaning at all, and you’ll wonder how it ever did.
Related: List of linguistic example sentences

