Amelia Bedelia

plural Amelia Bedelias

1. An eccentric but cheerful housekeeper with a penchant for accidentally causing chaos, especially by misinterpreting figurative expressions as literal.

   3 more examples

   For example, I did not know that the term "86" meant to run out of something, so when told by one chef to 86 arancini, I flew into a tizzy rummaging through every fridge looking for a giant tray of 86 nonexistent rice balls. The chef asked what I was doing, and when I told him, the entire kitchen erupted in laughter. I was like the Amelia Bedelia of kitchen help. They gave me the nickname Princeton for the rest of the shift to poke fun at my lack of genius.

   2024, Erin Wade, The Mac & Cheese Millionaire: Building a Better Business by Thinking Outside the Box, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, page 38

   Something happens to a woman when she has a baby. This beautiful miracle changes her forever. For me, I have become somewhat of a loon. We talked about that earlier. But I am serious. I am the Amelia Bedelia of motherhood. I just float around in a constant state of chaos, the likes of which are not cute. The scary part is that I don't even seem to care and if anything, I embrace this new identity.

   2018, Shelley Holtzendorff, The Job/Joy of Mommyhood, WestBow Press

   Of course, children's authors will also deliberately use morphology to derive anomalous forms. Parents may adore those forms in children because they are cute. When they occur in children's books, adults tend to perceive them as off-putting. One author who has drawn the ire of parents and librarians in particular is Barbara Park, whose heroine 'Junie B. Jones,' the Amelia Bedelia of grammar, writes replete with such anomalous forms such as bestest (Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus, 1992:2), rided (ibid., 5), hanged out my tongue (Mrs. Jones has a Monster under her Bed, 1997:11), and runned (ibid., 14).

   2018, Ralf Thiede, Children's Books, Brain Development, and Language Acquisition, Taylor & Francis