Today’s Pearls Before Swine:
The -’s possessive is multiply ambiguous, and that ambiguity can be exploited for language play. A few days ago, I posted about the greeting card caption “Here’s your dick in a card” (#3), turning on your dick ‘a/the dick for you’ vs. ‘the dick that belongs to you’. Now we have the the cat’s meow (idiomatic) ‘something/someone excellent’ vs. the (unlikely but possible) compositional ‘the meow that belongs to the cat’ (or possibly ‘the meow for the cat’, also compositional).
Bill is both the cat’s meow and the dog’s ruff.
