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shaggy-dog story
[ shag-ee-dawg, -dog ]
noun
- a funny story, traditionally about a talking dog, that, after an often long and involved narration of unimportant incidents, has an absurd or irrelevant punch line.
shaggy dog story
noun
- informal.a long rambling joke ending in a deliberate anticlimax, such as a pointless punch line
Word History and Origins
Origin of shaggy-dog story1
Idioms and Phrases
A long drawn-out anecdote with an absurd or anticlimactic ending. For example, At first he had us laughing wildly at his shaggy-dog stories, but after the third or fourth we found them tiresome . The term alludes to a well-known series of such stories, which involved a talking dog. [c. 1940]Example Sentences
This particular shaggy-dog story gets very shaggy, and at times it’s not clear whether Buckley himself knows where he wants the narrative to go.
He’s too rigorous a thinker to fall back on facile antagonisms between art and commerce, and too generous an entertainer to saddle a zigzagging shaggy-dog story with didacticism.
“Licorice Pizza”: Paul Thomas Anderson’s shaggy-dog story of self-discovery in ’70s San Fernando Valley feels to me like a loose, easy-breathing culmination for Anderson, a virtuoso filmmaker here at his most tender and organic.
The cumulative charms of these narrative byways fade as Koberidze’s meandering extends to two and a half hours, though the end section is glorious and there’s much to appreciate about a movie that reminds you that at times the best parts of a shaggy-dog story are the ostensibly pointless ones.
It laid out one thoughtful shaggy-dog story after another, then ended in this haymaker of a final episode that brought us sidelong to the arrival of the pandemic, which brought the season’s threads together even as, one by one, it snipped our threads of connection.
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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