nobody home

1. The person being discussed is mentally impaired and so cannot understand, as in When the woman did not answer, he concluded it was a case of nobody home . Both usages transfer the absence of someone in a dwelling to absent-mindedness or mental deficiency, and are thought to have been invented by cartoonist and journalist Thomas Aloysius Dorgan (“TAD”) around 1900. He often embellished his column with such punning amplifications as “Nobody home but the telephone and that's in the hands of the receiver,” or “Nobody home but the oyster and that's in the stew.”

2. No one is paying attention, as in She threw the ball right past him, yelling “Nobody home!”

Example Sentences

“What people don’t realize is that penis size does not matter, because the top two-thirds of the vagina has no nerve endings, there’s nobody home up there,” Johanson said to a roar of audience approval.

From Seattle Times

Some scholars claim that LLMs develop knowledge about the world, but most experts say otherwise — that while these technologies write coherently, there’s nobody home.

From Washington Post

More complex rounds include: “Oh How Lovely Is the Evening,” “Dona Nobis Pacem,” “Hey, Ho, Nobody Home,” which is in minor, and “Viva la Musica,” a 16th century round written by the Renaissance composer Giovanni Palestrina.

From Literature

“When ads calling for genocide in Ethiopia repeatedly get through Facebook’s net — even after the issue is flagged with Facebook — there’s only one possible conclusion: there’s nobody home,” said Rosa Curling, director of Foxglove, a London-based legal nonprofit that partnered with Global Witness in its investigation.

From Seattle Times

Any second they might peek through the window of our house, see nobody home, and realize what happened.

From Literature

Related Words

• deranged
• erratic
• irrational
• unhinged
• unsound
• unstable