nobody home

Idioms  

1. No one is paying attention, as in She threw the ball right past him, yelling “Nobody home!”

2. The person being discussed is mentally impaired and so cannot understand, as in When the woman did not answer, he concluded it was a case of nobody home . Both usages transfer the absence of someone in a dwelling to absent-mindedness or mental deficiency, and are thought to have been invented by cartoonist and journalist Thomas Aloysius Dorgan (“TAD”) around 1900. He often embellished his column with such punning amplifications as “Nobody home but the telephone and that's in the hands of the receiver,” or “Nobody home but the oyster and that's in the stew.”

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Example Sentences

Some scholars claim that LLMs develop knowledge about the world, but most experts say otherwise — that while these technologies write coherently, there’s nobody home.

From Washington Post

More complex rounds include: “Oh How Lovely Is the Evening,” “Dona Nobis Pacem,” “Hey, Ho, Nobody Home,” which is in minor, and “Viva la Musica,” a 16th century round written by the Renaissance composer Giovanni Palestrina.

From Literature

Any second they might peek through the window of our house, see nobody home, and realize what happened.

From Literature

“It just seems like there’s nobody home, which is tragic,” said William Yeomans, who worked in the department’s civil rights division, which includes the voting section, for over two decades.

From The Guardian

“If all the sudden, they go from ‘everybody home all the time’ to ‘nobody home all day long,’ it can lead to some serious behavioral problems.”

From New York Times

Related Words

• deranged
• erratic
• irrational
• unhinged
• unsound
• unstable