A couple of weeks ago I was visiting my Mom, who lives in a retirement community. One of her neighbors had just painted their house. They painted their house the most garish shade of aqua that you can imagine, with fuschia trim. It was a true eyesore. My Mom and I were standing outside in her driveway looking at it in disbelief, when I said to her..."What were they thinking?"
Her response was much more succinct. "It looks like shit on a white horse."
I grew up with idioms such as that...yet I find them disappearing from the lengua franca in America. Another victim of the "mall-inization", or homogenization, of our culture and our language. American English was once marked by a plethora of idioms that both added color to the language and probably made it that much more difficult for immigrants to learn. I'm fairly fluent in Spanish, but try transliterating an expression like "it's raining cats and dogs" into the Spanish, and watch the blank stares. Idioms don't translate...or only rarely.
I grew up in a part of America that was uniquely positioned for idiomatic English...about 35 miles north of the old Mason-Dixon Line, in southeastern Ohio. Even the term Mason-Dixon Line has probably been lost on most Americans born after, say, 1980 at least. I'll bet less than 20% of High School seniors could accurately describe what the Mason-Dixon Line is, means, or where it's boundary line exists on a map of the U.S.
Straddling that line, my language was influenced by both Southern antecedents and Northern ones. It was particularly rich in idiomatic English. Those old expressions are falling by the wayside...replaced, it seems, by a new, more nationwide kind of idiom that is based more upon acronyms (based, as well, upon the advent of the computer, email and texting. As useful as the acronym STFU is...or WYFP...it seems they add little to the "color" of our language. Sometimes the scenic route to saying what you wish to say is a better path than the most expedient and economical route.
Some of the old idioms still live on, and have a sort of evergreen quality to them, but others are disappearing fast. The language, I fear, is poorer for their demise. Follow me below for some of my favorite idioms, and some that are, to be honest, a bit coarse, but colorful nonetheless. Perhaps you have some of your own to throw into the pot.
One of my favorite expressions I heard growing, used to describe someone who was unusually anxious or nervous, was "He/She's as jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs." One needs only to visualize that cat for a moment, dodging and flitting about to keep its tail from being pinched, to appreciate the aptness of the phrase.
A variation, verging on the more crass (and let's face it...idioms are heavily represented in what would be fairly termed "crassness")...is "She was as nervous as a whore in Curch" (Or "sweating like a whore in Church') . Idioms are not high culture...yet they accurately reflect culture. It's a rich vein to mine, so I will divide it up rather indiscrimanantly into a few categories. As well as what the game show Jeopardy would categorize "potpouri".
Weather
As well as the aforementioned "raining cats and dogs", the are many expressions that describe weather. As Mark Twain famously said, everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. That's why he is the best American author...he knew his milieu, and was the only American writer who truly relished and wrote in the American vernacular.
"It's hotter than a tin shithouse" is an expression I grew up with. Not just because, in southeastern Ohio in the Sixties, there were still, once you got outside of the town limits, not a few outhouses. Most were made of wood. And in August, even the wooden ones were hot. One can imagine what a hot, August sun beating down upon an outhouse made of corrugated metal would feel like. It certainly wouldn't be pleasant.
Conversely...the expression "built like a brick shithouse" was a rural expression for a woman who was...well..BUILT. Solidly. Stupendously. Admirably. The Commodores later cleaned up the expression and turned it into their hit song "Brickhouse"...but everyone knew what they were referring to. It wasn't a brick house. It was a brick outhouse.
"Colder than a well digger's ass" is one I grew up with as well. Nobody digs wells anymore, so I suspect that it's germainess has come and gone. Having done some genealogy, I can tell you that my great grandfather died digging a well. He slipped and ended up upside down about 30 feet below the ground, and drowned before anyone could extricate him from his predicament. I suspect well digging was, indeed, a cold affair...but who knows? We don't dig wells anymore.
As for the crass...my Mother's second husband was the King of Crass...and an unmittigated Rube. (aren't they all?) His favorite expression for a hot, sultry Midwestern August afternoon, when the temp was 98 and the humidity was the same, was that it was "hotter than a half fucked fox in a forest fire." Crude, but to the point.
Poverty
My family was poor. How poor were they? "They were as poor as Church mice." What the hell is a church mouse? It's a mouse that unfortunately takes up residence in the one structure in town that has no pantry, no refridgerator, no food inside. It's a Church mouse....living in a warm place with no food.
Similarly, there is the slang, as opposed to idiom, for the most utilitarian of kitchen tools...the can opener/bottle opener. My family called it a church key. Why? I have no idea...but I suspect it had more to do with the bottle opener end than it did with the can opener end. In this age of flip tops and pull tabs...I doubt many teens are familiar with the term "church key."
If someone was truly destitute, "They didn't have a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out of." Well...I'm only only 55, but I can remember pissing into a pot (actually, a 3 lb coffee can) when I visited my grandparents in the 60's...One pair had a real bathroom, but it was down in the basement, and at 1:00 AM it was eaier to piss into a pot than it was to put your shoes on and go outside and walk around to the basement to use the bathroom. My other grandparents lived in the country, and had no inside plumbing...same thing.
No 18 year old has memories like this...or a similar reference point.
Character
Whether you were "as pure as the driven snow", or "as crooked as a dog's hind leg", there were expressions to describe your character that have largely fallen by the wayside. I don't know any judges...so I can't attest to the expression "as sober as a judge." Nor do I really know where the term "three sheets to the wind" comes from. "Drunk as a skunk" seems to me to be a purely illiterative expression, but perhaps it is related to the term "stinking drunk." I especially like the expression "crooked as a dog's hind leg", and regularly use it...but find that people less and less make a connection to it.
My Mother once made a remark about Jacqueline Kennedy...it was her way of saying that she deemed her to be a prig and a person who had an artificial gentility about herself...she said "She wouldn't say shit it she stepped in it."
Think about it for a moment...it does say something about a person's affectations in a very succinct manner, which sums up a lot of things. Related is an expression that refers to someone who has an unduly inflated self image..."He doesn't think his own shit stinks."
As I said...many of these old idioms are rather scatological and course...but colorful and descriptive nonetheless. Some of them are also, sadly, overtly racist...and while I grew up with these as well, I won't go into them here. It took me a long time to sort them out, see them for what they are, and rid my vocabulary of them. That, too, is part of growing up where I did. I think I was 15 years old before I realized that "a coon's age" wasn't a referrence to raccoons, but rather a referrence to the perceived longevity of African Americans. I still don't know whether "calling a spade a spade" is a referrence to card games or a racial slur. So yeah...there is a dark side to American idioms.
But by and large...I find them to be mostly throwbacks to a simpler, more rural time...when we had time to create roundabout ways of saying something very common that nowadays we have no time for. Hence, the acronyms that flourish.
While today we might say "I'm buried", with respect to work...we once would use expressions like "I'm busier than a one armed paper-hanger." But who uses wallpaper anymore? And who know's what a paper hanger is? Is it a check bouncer? Ask my Dad, who grew up in the country and went to a one room schoolhouse until highschool, how he got to school. and he'll tell you he got there "on Shank's Mare."
What the hell is that? Even I had to look it up.
My family moved to California when I was six years old. It was a state, I always said, that had no accent. It was a place people moved to and lost their accents in. It was a melting pot, within a melting pot. They also lost their idioms there...and adopted a new, homogenous way of speaking. One which didn't allude to their origins. It became, I'm afraid, the national language. And while we all speak the same language, there's something to be said for the regional roots that we have, for some 50 years now, either overtly or inadvertantly buried.
When it comes to American idioms, I'm afraid most young people these days don't know "shit from Shinola." Just as I have to continuously google all of the many acronyms that pop up here on Daily Kos.