It’s day 2 of daylight savings, so of course I woke up with the Christmas song “Up on the Housetop” stuck in my head. This sent me into quite a rumination about WHY it’s up on the “housetop” instead of “rooftop”? Who says housetop?
Googling this troubling question only leads me to a “howstuffworks.com” explanation of how Santa delivers presents.
It does, additionally, clarify that the next lyric is “reindeer pause” not “reindeer paws.” HOOVES.
More housetop/rooftop conundrums via Duolingo, where I’m studying Russian and Mandarin: “An arrow hit him in the leg.”
IN the leg? (This comes from a Russian lesson titled “History and Fantasy,” so I guess this might be the fantasy part. In history, arrows just hit you on the leg.)
Then again…we do say “He was shot in the arm,” but I don’t know that I’d say “She was shot in the leg.” Shot in the thigh, yes, or the calf…am I just losing my mind due to daylight savings? I lost a whole hour that I could have spent thinking about prepositions.
The practice sentence that’s causing my possible change of heart (change OF heart, not change IN heart or change TO heart…) was “The warrior was shot in the arm.”
But I was thinking about this too much and got distracted, so I answered “The warrior was in the arm” and missed that question. That would be a sentence for fantasy, not history. The Greeks were in the horse; the warriors were in the arm!
