Talk:monkeys humping a football

Moved from the discussion on special:Requests for deletion I've edited out a couple of no-longer-relevant bits. They're still on the rfd history if anyone cares. -dmh 16:30, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• nybody can make up a colourful simile. That does not prove that the term has a special meaming of its own. Eclecticology 07:12, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • I put in monkeys humping a football in a moment of levity. While it's generally used as a simile, as in the example, it's also used on its own. For example (from this page)

JEN ELLISON (BFA, Acting, ’96) is the Artistic Director of WNEP Theatre. She is currently performing there in Losers Bracket: Four Monkeys Humping a Football, WNEP Theatre, 3209 N. Halsted, www.wneptheater.org, 773/755-1693, through 10/26/02.

You can also find the variant "monkeys hump'n a football" on this related page. Perhaps we should add a separate entry for that as well?

I agree that the simile is pretty easy to figure out, but this particular formulation has become idiomatic. One test of this is that if you substitute, say, "baseball" or "beachball" for "football" you get no google hits, vs. 11 for "football". 11 hits is not too bad actually -- it's about 10% of the hits for "monkeys humping" by itself. The point (if there is one) is that the phrase, while rare, still occurs far too frequently to be explained by pure chance. I certainly didn't make it up. -dmh 19:04, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Okay, so it's used, though an entry under the simple "monkeys humping" might be more appropriate. The undocumented "quotation" in the article does not help us in understanding that it means what the definition says it means. That it was used as the title for a play reveals nothing about what it means. Using it as a specific reference to football gives more the impression of being in a huddle than running around aimlessly. If the only usages are in similes, or implied similes for the play title then perhaps "like" is a necessary part of the expression. Google alone is not reliable documentation because so much of the material is ephemeral; their 11 hits include one for this "rfd" page. It would be so much nicer if someone were to find where and by whom the expression was first used. Eclecticology 10:28, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

So are you saying there is no such saying? Actually it appears that the singular is better attested. Here it is, referred to as a saying ("Now I know where people get that saying, yes a monkey humping a football.") There's even a definition here: "3-way,4-way,5-way 40k battles = Monkey humping a football ... A whole lot of effort is going on, but not alot of action is getting done."

Frankly, I'm not a great believer in quotations for most articles, though I'm probably biased since I spend much of my time with the most frequent few thousand words. There are good exceptions (the quotations in hierophant are excellent), but in many if not most cases hunting down a well-documented published attestation is more trouble than it's worth. If it's there, by all means use it, but it's a nice-to-have, not a sine qua non.

In the present case, the most illustrative uses are from random google hits (particularly biker-related, it seems). As you point out, the WNEP quotation is useless for illustrating meaning. The only reason I brought it up is that I thought it might convince you that people actually use the phrase.

At this point, I don't see how there could be any reasonable doubt that

• People actually do say monkey/monkeys humping a football.
• Either can be used without like (though the singular form seems to have a stronger identity as a separate metaphor.)
• The item in question is always a football (monkeys humping by itself is not productive in the linguistic sense).

If you do a little more digging (and I would strongly suggest this, rather than simply saying "no, that's not good enough either" to whatever I come up with). You'll find that humping a football by itself may be productive. Other actors include a dog and Madonna, but I would still argue for a separate mention of monkeys as they seem to have the, erm, lion's share of the action.

e may discuss the deeper issues of whether the singular and plural forms are worth separate mentions (I tend to think they might be), and whether humping a football is worth its own entry (my guess is no) -dmh 16:30, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

For the record, the irony of spending this much time debating the merits of a phrase depicting much action with little result is not lost on me -dmh 15:12, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)