Butt of ridicule

Grammar usage guide and real-world examples

Currently, Johnson, a butt of ridicule three years ago, is the best bowler in the world, whatever the ICC list says.

That retrograde step made Kansas the butt of ridicule and led an aroused electorate to oust several conservative board members last year, opening the way for this week's approval of new standards prepared by scientists and educators.

Since the end of Reconstruction in 1877, when white rule returned to the South, not a single civil-rights act had survived the Senate.Power lay with the committee chairmen, leaving the Senate majority leader so powerless as to be a butt of ridicule.

His years there were probably unhappy because, although he was proud of his middle-class origin, he was a constant butt of ridicule because of his ungainly figure, morose manner, and biting tongue; the bitterness of his book reflects the inferiority of his social position.

Our current disregard of non-economic motivations is even more surprising when we learn that less than a century ago, the Enlightenment's "narrow rational programme" for individual happiness had already become "the butt of ridicule and contempt" – as the Austrian modernist writer Robert Musil observed in 1922.

The explanation quickly became the butt of national ridicule, prompting television crews and opposition politicians to visit the office to request tastings of the pricey purified water.

The famous halo is the butt of endless ridicule in Iran, most recently in a song addressed to Ahmadinejad in the style of the medieval poet Molavi, which has become a sort of anthem of the Tehran June: "You are violence without sight/ A halo without the light".

The similarity to Osama, America's universal symbol of evil and mass death and destruction has been just too juicy to pass up as the butt of jokes, ridicule, and sincere or calculated confusion.

Even apple slices are now a target of ridicule.

Sitting with the man who'd been the butt of so much ridicule, I couldn't help but feel sorry for him — and slightly guilty.

But GOP House ultra-conservatives will still likely fight to the barricades on the tax hikes and deep spending cuts in non-military programs, even at the risk of making the party the butt of even more public ridicule and its taking a further hit on its political credibility.