THE PENGUIN'S PORTION

I ran into a friend of mine in a bar a while ago. Let's call the bar the Dew Drop Inn. (That's not really its name, but I don't want it to be overrun by tourists.) Let's call my friend Doug. (Actually, that IS his name, but I don't care if Doug is overrun by tourists.) After several drinks, Doug brought up the expression "lion's share." As in, "Candidate X got the lion's share of the votes," or, "Doug drank the lion's share of the beer." He said he had a problem with that expression.

"What problem?" I asked.

"What does that mean, exactly?"

I said that, being King of Beasts, a lion gets most of the food.

Doug pointed out that since lions tended to hang out with other lions, they would each get the same amount of food out of a kill, so really, a lion's share wouldn't be all that much.

Doug had a point, but I didn't want to concede it. I'm competitive by nature, and Doug has an annoying way of flaring his nostrils when he's right about something.

I ordered another beer and thought about it.

"What if," I posited, "a lion and a penguin are friends, and they go out to lunch together one day. The lion kills a caribou, and they chow down. Who gets the 'lion's share' then, Doug?"

"That's ridiculous, Bob," Doug said. (Bob is not my real name, by the way.) "Penguins live at the South Pole and lions live in Africa and India."

He was flaring his nostrils.

"Think outside the box, Doug!" I yelled, slamming my bottle down on the bar for effect. (The main effect was that the bartender told us to keep it down.)

We batted it back and forth for a while, and several beers (and shots) later, right before we were asked to leave, I not only had my friend convinced that "lions share" is the perfect expression for the most of something, but also that "penguin's portion" should become the corresponding expression for the least of something. As in, "Candidate Y got the penguin's portion of the votes," or, "Doug got the penguin's portion when they handed out the brains."

Since then I've been trying to get my other friends to use my new expression. Half of the people I've told this story to think I should be in Bartlett's Quotations. The other half think I should be in Alcoholics Anonymous.