Picking up on Lars’ post on idioms a few days ago, Dr. Goodword is all over idioms and slang this week like white on rice.

One of the greatest tricks of the comedian is to find situations where an idiom may, in fact, be analyzed, leaving the listener in a quandary—does he or she mean the idiom or the literal meaning? In an episode of the TV series Mash, hearing that a soldier has been dishonrably discharged, Hawk-eye asked, “Why? Was he rotten to the corps?” Now, when you hear this, it sounds identical to the idiom “rotten to the core”, which means simply to be extermely bad. Which did Hawk-eye mean, corps or core?

And no, I don’t know that the good doctor was inspired by Lars’ post. Possible–probable–but I can’t say.