Cluelessness

[stoutfellow]

Now this is a classic putdown, due to Mark Kleiman. I'll omit the name of the subject, so as not to distract from the true beauty of the insult.

How clueless is [X]? He doesn't have a clue. He's never had a clue. He couldn't get a clue if he waited for the clue mating season, found a group of horny female clues, sprayed himself all over with clue pheromones, and did the clue mating dance.

Addendum: I am now informed that this is not original with Mr. Kleiman; a version of the quote is attributed to one John Sinnott, who as far as I can tell died in 1896. Huh.

Comments

[desert-vixen.livejournal.com]

ROFLMAO!!

DV (wonders what the clue mating dance looks like...)

[the-blue-fenix.livejournal.com]

I think I ran into a variant of that on rec.arts.sf.written a few years ago. There may have also been a clue migration route involved.

1896? Either 'get a clue' is a much older expression than I'd realized, or Wikipedia is reversing digits.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

One of the phrases that often gets bandied about on the American Dialect Society list is "the Illusion of Recency". People tend to think innovations in language are more recent than they actually are.

I do recall seeing "he hasn't (got?) a clue" in some of James Herriot's books, recounting incidents from between the wars. I don't know how much weight to put on that, since he was writing about them years later.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Sounds pretty darned hopeless to me... [g]