pee in the pickles
v. phr.— «My old man referred to it as peeing in the pickles. Only he used a different word. I never got the connection but I knew he meant taking your eye off the ball. Or in Tony Stewart’s (7-1) case not paying attention to his driving while turning left at 190 MPH.» —“Texas Motor Speedway preview” by NASCAR Jack Covers.com Nov. 4, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...