Irish bull

You can't trust him farther than a pregnant Irish bull!

"She is in all ways my fellow (if you don't mind the Irish bull).

Through this he gained his lasting reputation as an inveterate perpetrator of Irish bulls.

They are also called Irish bulls.

Essay on Irish Bulls - 1802 (political, collaborated with her father)

The "Irish bull" is to the sense of a statement what the dangling participle is to the syntax.

A type of Irish joke, an "Irish bull" is styled after these.

The Irish bull can be a potent form of self-conscious equivocation and satire in the hands of a wit's sharp tongue.

O'Brien shrugged, so very paradoxicalma pregnant Irish bull, he half remembered from somewhere.

This type of tale, indeed, may be pretty fairly paralleled with the ordinary anecdote terminating in a repartee or an Irish bull.

An Irish bull is a ludicrous, incongruent or logically absurd statement, generally unrecognized as such by its author.

Nobody in the office knew that Pearson's Magazine was falling into a stale Irish bull, which must be as old as St. Patrick.

Essay on Irish Bulls rejects an English stereotype of Irishmen and portrays them accurately in realistic, everyday settings.

Although, strictly speaking, Irish bulls are so structured grammatically as to be logically meaningless, their actual effect upon listeners is usually to give vivid illustrations to obvious truths.

Equally famous (though as an Irish bull) is his question of a former student shortly after World War I: "Was it you or your brother who was killed in the war?"

Very likely such mock self-mockery gave rise to the term Irish bull (as opposed to just any bull) in works such as Samuel Lover's novel Handy Andy.

Elsewhere, the phrase has been viewed more kindly: as a "quaint, old Irish bull", or as simply as the creation of a well-meaning pioneer who was possessed of bad rhetoric.

Irish by name and irish by nature, says Mr Stephen, and he sent the ale purling about, an Irish bull in an English chinashop.

Hence, as John Pentland Mahaffy, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, famously observed, "an Irish bull is always pregnant", i.e. with truthful meaning.

This method is lampooned by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in Euclid and his Modern Rivals, calling it an "Irish bull" because it apparently requires the triangle to be in two places at once.

While these Irish bulls have led many writers to portray Roche as a buffoon, other biographers have interpreted them not as blunders, but as calculated attempts to disarm opposition to ministerial policies through humour.

The "father" of the Irish bull is often said to be Sir Boyle Roche, who once asked "Why we should put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?".

Or, to make an Irish bull, I should expect the next stage in Evolution not to be a stage in Evolution at all: should expect the Evolution itself as a method of producing change, will be superseded.

I'm told the Cornerstone Pub, the Nineteenth Pub and both hotels have good music most nights of the week, and all have "reasonable" Guinness - the thick black nectar that has fueled Irish bull sessions through the generations.

Extensive use of Irish bulls are made of by American Jewish humorists, from the period when large numbers of recent Jewish immigrants from Germany or Eastern Europe were present in American cities, which suggests that a similar effect produced the term "Irish bull", which is partly contemptuous and partly homage.