as obstinate as a mule.

[Silver]

Hi,

If I want to say someone who is obstinate, is it very old-fashioned to say things like this:


She was/is as obstinate as a mule.


Thanks a lot

 

[Sharifa345]

Hi,

If I want to say someone who is obstinate, is it very old-fashioned to say things like this:


She was/is as obstinate as a mule.


Thanks a lot

If you change "obstinate" to "stubborn," you have a very common expression.

She's as stubborn as a mule.

 

[Silver]

Thanks a lot, so "obsinate" isn't idiomatic here, right?

 

[owlman5]

That's right, Silver. "Stubborn" is the ordinary word in this expression.

 

[boozer]

I'm almost sure I've heard/seen "obstinate as a mule" as well...

 

[Silver]

Probably "stubborn" is commonly regarded as a set expression while the latter one is usually considered as a new but understandable phrase.

 

[Copyright]

Google:
"obstinate as a mule": about 191,000 results
"stubborn as a mule": about 900,000 results

 

[natkretep]

COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English, 1990-2011) has 11 occurrences of stubborn as a mule and none for obstinate as a mule.

BNC (British National Corpus, 1980s-1993) has 3 occurrences of stubborn as a mule and none for obstinate as a mule.

BUT the COHA (Corpus of Historical American English 1810s-2000) has 20 occurrences of stubborn as a mule and 19 occurrences of obstinate as a mule. Here's an example:

Never would take my advice. Obstinate as a mule. But I'll pay her out yet, ha, ha! Forgery! Scandal, ha, ha! (Houghton Townley, The Scarlet Feather, 1909)

Seems to confirm what other people have said. I think you can still say obstinate as a mule, but it sounds more literary.

 

[boozer]

Seems to confirm what other people have said. I think you can still say obstinate as a mule, but it sounds more literary.

Indeed, "obstinate" sounds to me just a tad fancier, somehow. It did not strike me as something unheard of or inconceivable, though I couldn't, for the life of me, know why it seemed familiar. Now that I think of it, I may have picked it up at school from some ancient source, the kind used in my school books in the 80s and 90s.

(Back then, anything written in the 30s to 50s and used as a sample of English in our books was considered to be contemporary English, latest fashion. The average age of the sources used was about 1.5 centuries )

 

[Thomas1]

Hello,

The Oxford English Dictionary gives an example of 'as obstinate as a mule':

1809–12 M. Edgeworth Absentee xiii, She was as obstinate as a mule on that point.