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.”

---

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 • Feb. 13, 2023

That's one of the things that led to — certainly on the corporate side — people thinking we need to have more family-friendly policies because there is nobody home watching the kids.

From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 28, 2016

Imagine how big Rodgers' eyes got when he saw nobody home to defend Randall Cobb.

From Chicago Tribune • Dec. 30, 2013

So should we be welcoming Agnes Brown into the pantheon of comedy greats, or changing the pantheon's locks and pretending there's nobody home?

From The Guardian • Jan. 29, 2013

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

From "Everything Sad Is Untrue" by Daniel Nayeri

Related Words

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