Hens' teeth

occam

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Jun 25, 2022, 2:52:30 AM6/25/22

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"as rare as..." was the context of the expression of "hens' teeth" that
I recently came across. It made me smile.

"horsefeathers" is the only other expression I know of that tries to
convey the same idea. Any others?

'fish fingers', 'snakes' toes' ...the possibilities are endless.

Paul Carmichael

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Jun 25, 2022, 3:33:59 AM6/25/22

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Rocking horse shit.

--
Paul.

https://paulc.es/elpatio

Richard Heathfield

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Jun 25, 2022, 3:42:55 AM6/25/22

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capitalist's heart
socialist's brain
liberal's soul
radical's humour
boxer's wits

Easy game.

--
Richard Heathfield
Email: rjh at cpax dot org dot uk
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
Sig line 4 vacant - apply within

occam

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Jun 25, 2022, 5:29:37 AM6/25/22

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On 25/06/2022 09:42, Richard Heathfield wrote:
> On 25/06/2022 7:52 am, occam wrote:
>> "as rare as..." was the context of the expression of "hens' teeth" that
>> I recently came across. It made me smile.
>>
>> "horsefeathers" is the only other expression I know of that tries to
>> convey the same idea. Any others?
>>
>>
>> 'fish fingers', 'snakes' toes' ...the possibilities are endless.
>
> capitalist's heart
> socialist's brain
> liberal's soul
> radical's humour
> boxer's wits
>
> Easy game.
>

You omitted: politician's integrity; lawyer's truthfulness; estate
agent's honesty, etc. I agree, easy enough.

However, these are not omissions due to evolutionary factors. They are
omissions of nurture, not nature.

Richard Heathfield

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Jun 25, 2022, 5:41:28 AM6/25/22

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Nurture *is* an evolutionary factor.

CDB

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Jun 25, 2022, 6:53:32 AM6/25/22

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A day in June?

If you want to see life glisten, just look at a slug.

GordonD

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Jun 25, 2022, 7:21:47 AM6/25/22

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That's the one my dad used to use.

However fish fingers aren't rare - I have a packet in my freezer.

--
Gordon Davie
Edinburgh, Scotland

Jerry Friedman

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Jun 25, 2022, 9:10:29 AM6/25/22

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On Saturday, June 25, 2022 at 1:42:55 AM UTC-6, Richard Heathfield wrote:
> On 25/06/2022 7:52 am, occam wrote:
> > "as rare as..." was the context of the expression of "hens' teeth" that
> > I recently came across. It made me smile.
> >
> > "horsefeathers" is the only other expression I know of that tries to
> > convey the same idea. Any others?
> >
> >
> > 'fish fingers', 'snakes' toes' ...the possibilities are endless.

> capitalist's heart
> socialist's brain
> liberal's soul
> radical's humour
> boxer's wits
>
> Easy game.

"After that the Æsir feared they should never be able to get the Wolf bound.
Then Allfather sent him who is called Skírnir, Freyr's messenger, down into
the region of the Black Elves, to certain dwarves, and caused to be made the
fetter called Gleipnir. It was made of six things: the noise a cat makes in
foot-fall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a rock, the sinews of a bear, the
breath of a fish, and the sinews of a bird."

Snorri Sturluson, /The Prose Edda/, translated by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur

https://books.google.com/books?id=_T1cAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA43

I don't know why bears were thought not to have sinews.

--
Jerry Friedman

occam

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Jun 25, 2022, 11:12:54 AM6/25/22

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Does that mean you know why women are not thought to have beards? (Every
circus worth its salt used to have a bearded woman pre-1900.)

soup

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Jun 25, 2022, 11:42:39 AM6/25/22

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On 25/06/2022 07:52, occam wrote:
> "as rare as..." was the context of the expression of "hens' teeth" that
> I recently came across. It made me smile.

The two I have heard of are
Hen's teeth and,
Rocking horse shit

> "horsefeathers" is the only other expression I know of that tries to
> convey the same idea. Any others?

I rather felt "horsefeathers" meant gibberish, nonsense, rubbish, etc etc

Garrett Wollman

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Jun 25, 2022, 7:18:00 PM6/25/22

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In article <jhnplb...@mid.individual.net>,

occam <nob...@nowhere.nix> wrote:
>"as rare as..." was the context of the expression of "hens' teeth" that
>I recently came across. It made me smile.
>
>"horsefeathers" is the only other expression I know of that tries to
>convey the same idea. Any others?

Stephen Jay Gould's third collection of essays (published 1983) was
titled _Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes_, after the title of one of the
essays therein. It is of course about how the odd-toed ungulates
(Perissodactyla), which today have either three toes or one toe on
each foot, evolved from five-toed ancestors, and connects that to
embryology and development (or what was known about it in the early
1980s, anyway). Horses have vestigial toe bones from their second and
fourth toes, and occasionally, horses are born with developmental
abnormalities that allow these long-suppressed toes to develop into
substantial, if non-functional, digits.

The thing about hen's teeth, of course, is that birds have not had
teeth for 60 million years, but if tissue from the right part of a
chicken embryo is grafted into the right part of a mouse, it can
develop into a tooth, demonstrating that chickens still maintain the
developmental machinery of their toothed dinosaur ancestors. Since
this requires human intervention, whereas polydactyly occurs naturally
in horses, hen's teeth have to be rarer than horse's (supernumerary)
toes.

-GAWollman

--
Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
wol...@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)

bil...@shaw.ca

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Jun 26, 2022, 2:37:39 AM6/26/22

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On Saturday, June 25, 2022 at 12:33:59 AM UTC-7, Paul Carmichael wrote:

> Rocking horse shit.
>
You mean sawdust?

bill

Richard Heathfield

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Jun 26, 2022, 2:46:08 AM6/26/22

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I suspect he means rocking horse shit.