in the bag
other.— «After a year training at Burnham Military Camp and in Egypt, he found himself in Crete and “in the bag,” as they called it, a prisoner of war on a bitter journey to the “hell camp” in Germany called Stalag VIIIB.» —“Love and barbed wire” by Pam Jones Otago Daily Times (Dunedin, New Zealand) Apr. 25, 2009. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Susan from Virginia Beach, Virginia, shares the phrase her mother used when the kids refused to eat: It’ll grow hair on your back teeth. This supposed motivator likely blends two older traditions: a German idiom, Haare auf den Zähnen haben...
In English, we may express regret colloquially with the rhyming phrase Shoulda, woulda, coulda! German speakers also use a rhyming phrase to suggest the same idea: Hätte, hätte, Fahrradkette!, which translates literally as “If only, if only, bicycle...