I love old sayings like this. I always find it interesting to find the origin. So many of them came from a term that was so literal, it's fascinating. "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" This originated back when everybody in the house had to take a bath out of the same water, the oldest would start first. Resulting in the baby to be the last one to take a bath...The water would be so dirty that they would say "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water" No it's an expression of keeping valuable things we don't want to get rid of. My boss just said it today talking about a particular investor, one that we used to use all the time but now have had to replace, they are still valuable so he wants us to keep them signed on.....thus saying find some other banks but "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" FOCUS what proverbial sayings will arise from our generation?? What will people say 100 years from now that came from our culture?? I though an example might be that 100 years from now a kid is filming his buddy trying to do a back flip out of a rather high tree branch, he tells his friend "Careful or you will end up on YouTube..." not knowing or having any idea what YouTube is or was. SECOND FOCUS- list some of your favorite sayings with their origins, maybe apply it to a funny incident in present day. (kind of like when my dad said "look before you leap" when my brother ran and jumped into a giant pile of manure.)
"That's about as smart as investing in HD DVD's" "That's about as promising as a government buy out" "and let me guess, you invented the internet too, Al Gore?"
Focus Two-- phrases that at one point meant one thing and morph into something else, usually offensive and completely unintended. For example, "Rode Hard and Put Up Wet" I guess that's funny. And then, there's the ever-popular "niggardly," which, according to Wikipedia: We know where this leads. This word alone has sunk a number of careers, as in, you say this word in public, you get fired. Focus One: All the 'net-speak terms that are used now, like l337, pwned, haxor, oh hai. People will forget that they started from spastic mis-typers doped up on Ritalin and pop-rocks.
Back in math class in middle school, a kid came up with a way to go about answering a problem. My teachers response was, "Well, that's one way to skin a cat" That one still gives me a good chuckle, I have no idea of it's origin and I have never heard it used since.
Family is from the south. My favorite one has to be: Well that dog just ain't gon hunt. Seconded only by: You ain't gon catch no fish tryin ta watch my line.
I swear to god, I want to write my Thesis on the Language of LOLcats. Its fascinating how its going backwards along the progression to language. Its going from being written to spoken, while every other language has gone from spoken to written. I think it will eventually evolve into another dialect of English Focus: I was always a fan of "... and the horse you rode in on." I've never been able to find a good origin story for it though. Anyone know?
That is just a deviation from the saying ' There is more than one way to skin a cat' , which , if I recall correctly, comes from the good old cat skinning days of the 1640's.
I've always been a big fan of these random little sayings. Most of them I've gotten from my family and from growing up in Oklahoma. My all time favorite is for referring to someone who is wasted drunk: "That guy is Drunker 'n Cooter Brown" Another of my favorites is the classic Six of one, half a dozen of the other, which pretty obviously means that the two choices you have are about the same. Of course I usually shorten it down and just say "well, six of one...", that usually brings about some odd looks. I am also reminded of when I worked in the cart barn and a golf course in town when I was in high school. We had an old guy that worked in the pro shop named George and he may have been the grumpiest old man I have ever met. And he had some nasty, droopy old man tits. Anyway, whenever it would get to be about mid July-August and would be really hot outside, he would come into the pro shop (with sweat stains under his man tits) and proclaim "It's hotter out there than two rats fuckin' in a wool sock!. I've got a bunch more of these, but I can't think of them right now, they seem to only come to mind when they are pertinent. I'll post again when I remember some more.
"It's hotter than a fresh fox getting fucked in a forest fire." From Wiktionary. Dixie Bandit, can you help enlighten us? Do you people fuck foxes in forest fires? And if so, how hot is it?
Sweating like a whore in church is one of my favorites when the weather gets hot. There are a bunch of these down here where it's hot 9 months of the year. Sweating like a dog in a Korean restaurant Sweating like a nun in a field of cucumbers Sweating like a blind lesbian in a fish market I also like drunker than a sailor (or Irishman) on payday
There was a great line in full metal jacket, "Pyle you move as fast as old people fuck!!" When and why did people skin cats?
I once saw a movie, maybe "Meatballs" or something similair, where the "bad guy" rode into camp on a horse, and the semi retarded groundskeeper flipped him the bird, once the usual way, and again horizontally. When asked, he told him the first was for him, and the second " for the horse you rode in on." Might not be the origins, but it's the first place I ever saw or heard it used.
That reminds me from another one: like poop through a goose I had a friend who loved a variation of that quote: You (perform some activity) like old people fuck, slow and sloppy
You an' me goin' fishin' in the dark... Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are!
The cats tits The cats meow The cats ass or "cat got an ass?" in response to a question I hear all of these on a daily basis from my boss Also adding the name Maynard to the end of pretty much any sentence for no reason has always confused me "Its hot as hell out here today Maynard"