shaggy dog story

See also: shaggy-dog story

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

Uncertain; probably from one of two jokes, one in which a protracted search for an alleged remarkably shaggy, talking dog ends in the discovery of the dog which, though it can indeed talk, is disappointingly not so shaggy after all; or one in which an even more protracted search for the shaggiest dog in the world ends in the utterly anticlimactic punchline “Now that’s a shaggy dog!”.

Pronunciation

  • Hyphenation: shag‧gy dog sto‧ry

Noun

shaggy dog story (plural shaggy dog stories)

  1. An intentionally long-winded joke or tale featuring the narration of typically irrelevant details, and usually ending with an absurd or pointless punchline which is often a pun or Spoonerism on a known catchphrase, with the intended humor deriving from the combination of the excessive length and the anticlimax.
    Synonyms: shaggy-dog tale, shaggy dog tale
    • 2016, Anna Keay, chapter 11, in The Last Royal Rebel, London: Bloomsbury:
      The plot as Titus Oates described it to the Privy Council was something of a shaggy dog story, long on digressions and incidental details, but short on hard facts.

Derived terms

See also

Further reading

Anagrams

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.