pea-likker juice
n.— «An extravagant metaphor applied to one who has demonstrated unusual ability or ingenuity. “Buck shore is the pealikker juice when it comes to standing in with the gals.” Confined to the lower South and derived from the use of cow-peas as a staple article of diet.» —by Harry Harrison Kroll in George Peabody College for Teachers A Comparative Study of Upper and Lower Southern Folk Speech (Martin, Tennesee) Aug., 1925. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
Katie in Kalamazoo, Michigan, wonders about the expression throw the book at, meaning to “try every means possible.” Did it originally involve literally throwing books? It’s just a metaphor in which the book refers to “the...