Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Grandaddy’s Aphorisms
Just wondering. I was recently reminded of my Grandaddy’s penchant for the colloquial observation. He grew up dirt poor in West Virginia. The derriere, the back of the front, the tush, the bum, the rump, the seat. In a time before digital calibration, this most lagging of the anatomy formed a bedrock against which the natural world was measured. Two of his aphorisms that endure from my childhood recollections are:
- Slicker than a soap maker’s ass, and
- Colder than a well digger’s ass.
He was also fond, every day at 5 p.m. sharp (you could set your watch by it), of proclaiming “Bread is the staff of life, but whiskey is life itself,” before sipping his bourbon and water.
Please chime in one and all with any other such sayings from a bygone era via our dearest relations.
Published in General
I heard someone on the radio say about H. Ross Perot back in the 1992 campaign that “his tray table is clearly not in the fully upright and locked position”.
So dry I could cough enough cotton to knit a sweater.
Mark Twain wrote about the difference between hot weather and normal weather in India.
Hot weather will melt a brass doorknob.
Normal weather will only make it mushy.
From my Daddy: “Grinning like a mule eating briars.”
If you have ever seen a mule eating briars, you know what that looks like.
“He was windier than a sack of cat’s [redact]holes.”
Grinning like a fox eating grapes through a picket fence. No; never saw it, but it’s a common expression in some places.
My dad used “colder than a well digger’s ass.”
Several other of his bon mots:
“Colder than a witch’s teat.”
“Hotter than a two-dollar pistol.”
“Drier than a popcorn fart.”
“He’s so tight he squeaks when he walks.”
“We’re in tall cotton.”
“He hasn’t got a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of.”
“He’s got a hitch in his git-a-long.”
“Louder than skeletons [fornicating] on a tin roof.”
“Worthless as teats on a bull.”
and the classic… “I’m sweatin’ like a whore in church!”
OK, you can redact this if it’s over the line.
You’ve heard about “tight” as a synonym for “frugal”. Cody from Berea, KY once said of an acquaintance, “He’s so tight every time he blinks his eyes his foreskin flies back.”
Never cry over spilt milk. Coulda been good whiskey.
Skin me once shame on you, skin me twice shame on me.
He’s a walking toothache.
When they bury him, they can carve on his tombstone “Here Lies Truth” because it never once came out of him.
I never heard any of these from parents or grandparents, but there are a few of them that I heard on the job when working as a construction laborer during my college summers, some of them over and over.
My wife’s grandfather used the term “potlicker” as a pejorative. I never knew what it meant, but it always struck me as funny.
Hotter than a furry fox in a forest fire.
Ugly as a rat with mange.
As nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
I´ve always like that one and have used it a few times.
Some of the nicknames of the food we ate would turn your stomach. The cleanest term we used was “sliders” for hamburgers, but not because they were little. We called them sliders because they were so greasy, they’d slide off the plate . . .
Time to take cookies is when cookies is passed.
Eyes bright, tail abush.
As rough as a badger’s arse, I’ve heard this used to describe shoddy workmanship. I’ve adapted it to the more alliterative as rough as a badger’s behind.
Reminds me: “Cold enough to freeze the…ummm…nose off a brass monkey.” Incorporated these days into standard English in the form, “real brass monkey weather, innit?”
“So dozy he couldn’t find his arse if you gave him a torch (flashlight) and a map.”
Might as well go for full out alliteration with:
Botched as a badger’s behind
Hmmn, maybe not. How about:
Bristly as a badger’s behind?
And this could be used if you objected to someone’s new beard
My bet would be that they always said something other than “nose,” but it was Bowdlerized in any mentions in print.
You are on the ball today!
One of my more profane friends’ Grandad often said that X “wasn’t worth a tinker’s damn.”
It’s a good, old phrase.
A tinker’s dam, not damn.
Tinkers of old were itinerant tradesman. They repaired various things, including tin pots. You would bring him a pot with a hole in it and he would fashion something out of clay to conform to the outside of the pot and let it dry. He followed this with a little molten tin, held in place by the clay. Once that had cooled, the repair was complete, and he’d knock the clay patch off of the pot. The clay patch was known a dam, and was useless thereafter.
Either that, or they swore so often, it lost all effect….
From Online Etymology Dictionary:
Well, damn! I guess that one didn’t clean up well.