Weird Little Phrases



The woman from whom
these are learned.

 I'm not talking about the potentially offensive ones here, but those pithy little phrases one hears from people in the generation up from one's own.

Today I was reminded of this because I just received an email from my mother - who is watching my kids in spite of having had knee surgery four days ago, go Mom! - and she said Lizzy was "covered in sand from ass to appetite".

I want to know exactly how far that is. What's the etymology? Does it mean literally from the child's backside to her mouth (or did it start out that way and has evolved)?

I wonder whether I have any phrases that my kids think are really strange.

It's similar to another one I've heard her use - "raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock". Now that's evocative (if yucky) of a mental picture - the splashy kind of rain.

Certainly more so than "raining cats and dogs".

I'm at work and I can't go searching for stuff like that from here; even if I had the time to do more than bang out a blog post on a break, I shudder to imagine the kinds of search results I would get with words like ass and pissing in my search terms. From work.

The last time I did that, it was at Atari (or maybe it was Infogrames at the time), searching for one of our own Duke Nuk'em games by subtitle. Yeah, "Land of the Babes"... not a great search term from work.

Besides, I try to keep this blog basically PG-rated.