OK, to sort these...

"Layabout" and "lazy-ass" (noun and adjective respectively) are used for someone who is expected to perform and simply neglects to do so.

A "vegetable" is someone who, through some disability, is incapable of significant movement and thought. carriegood's mom was using it in a hyperbolic way, just joking.

A bum is, strictly speaking, a homeless beggar who wanders around asking for handouts and sometimes is willing to work in return. You mostly hear it spoken as, "You lazy bum," where the speaker is comparing his target to a good-for-nothing vagrant loser.

"Slacker," my personal favorite, is a newish word used by younger people to refer to someone who just never tried very hard to do well for himself in the first place.

"Lump" and "slug" are old (but still good!) words that a Renaissance speaker would completely understand. They just compare the target to something slow, dull, and useless.

"Flaneur?" Is that English? I don't think that's English.

Oh, and I'm not saying that "much" IS a singular word, nor am I saying that "many" IS a plural word. That's just the form of the verb that goes with them when they're used with an understood noun following.

(cold in the head, fair warning, I may not understand this next time I look at it. Phoo.)

Um, "shoes" is still plural.

If you're looking at a batch of widgets, though, and you ask "How much are they," it's simply idiomatic, as well as ambiguous. The merchant could respond, "One hundred dollars," and you wouldn't know whether he was talking about one, a set, or the whole batch. In real life you'll instead hear things like "Fifty dollars a dozen," or "Ten dollars apiece," or "I'll sell the whole lot to you for a hundred dollars."

That was intended to be an illustration. Jenny, nobody ever says "Joneziziz." Just say "Joneziz."

That's what you get when you overanalyze... which I do, all the time. :)

Bozka:

,.?';;

Ah. Sorry. Eating popcorn on my lunch hour. :) Here's the link.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/6/messages/572.html

Found this today. It's interesting, and it contains a first use of the phrase. I should mention that "colors" is, if I'm not mistaken, the official british and American Navy word for the flags.

I'm not sure from the context whether Walt Disney, the man, or the Disney corporation was meant. Either way, it means that there is some characteristic that is considered typical of or is strongly associated with Disney, and the "out-Disneyer" is surpassing (outdoing) Disney in that respect.

One of the earliest notable uses of the construction is in the phrase "to out-Herod Herod." In the Christian Bible, King Herod was said to have ordered the slaughter of all the Hebrew children of toddler age and younger in an effort to kill the infant Jesus (apparently because he felt that Jesus was going to usurp his throne). Because this was such an outrageous, egregious, over-the-top thing to do, Herod's name was used as a general example of extreme behavior. Therefore, to "out-Herod Herod" meant to engage in behavior SO extreme that it shocked the speaker even more than the story about Herod and his mass murders.

There's a joke that's made the rounds a few times about this.

In some American school, the English teacher addressed the class, "In some languages languages, a double negative means a negative. In other languages, a double negative means a positive. This is possible to do in English, but it is not considered correct. However, there is no language in which a double positive means a negative."

Drawled a student from the back of the room, "Yeah. Right."

Ronnie, you pretend to be a free citizen of a civilized country and yet your manners are those of a barbarian. Why, pray tell?