Briefly noted, this Leigh Rubin cartoon passed on to me by Susan Fischer on Facebook today:
To understand this, you need to recognize a bull and a young goat
Two stock expressions, both of them similes, lie behind the two images of creatures entering retail establishments: like a bull in a china shop, like a kid in a candy store. The two ideas can appear as an explicit comparison, in a simile with like; or in a metaphor, with the comparison implicit: you are a (veritable) bull in a china shop; they were (proverbial) kids in a candy store.
(There is a Page on this blog on my postings about Leigh Rubin’s cartoons.)
The second image has a feature the first lacks: it’s a visiopun, a pun presented visually (see my 11/18 posting on the visiopun): the prospective customer is a kid ‘a young goat’. But the stock simile contains (as Rubin notes) a homonym for this noun, kid ‘a child or young person’ (informal). The first image shows a bull ‘an adult male bovine’, and the stock simile contains this noun.
And the first image has a feature the first lacks: the metaphor it alludes to is frozen rather than fresh; you can use it for its figurative content (‘a person who breaks things or who often makes mistakes or causes damage in situations that require careful thinking or behavior’ (Merriam-Webster on-line)) without working through what a literal bull in a literal china shop might have to do with this meaning. In Rubin’s wording, the first stock simile is an idiom.
The second image could be presented the same way, as Wiktionary does in defining like a kid in a candy store as ‘enthusiastic and excited as a result of having many pleasurable options to choose from’, but Rubin and I are inclined to see the metaphor as still vivid, so that Wiktionary is merely cataloguing — over-precisely, in my view (some kids are just crazed to get a lot of candy) — how kids act in a candy store, not actually defining an idiom. The distinction is a delicate one, and like a kid in a candy store could have different statuses for different people, and it certainly could ossify into an idiom over time. But for Rubin and me, at the moment, it’s not yet an idiom.
(as happy as a pig in shit is probably not yet an idiom; happy as a clam is indubitably an idiom)