If you’re feeling poorly, you have several options for expressing how crummy you feel, including: I feel like death on a soda cracker, I feel lower than a snake in a wagon rut, I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put up wet, or I feel...
There are lots of colloquial phrases to explain away the cacophony of a thunderstorm: The potato wagons are rolling, The tater wagon’s going over the bridge, The potato wagon broke down, and God is dumping out potatoes and washing them off. In...
If someone’s got melon, it means they’re smart. The expression most likely arose because of the resemblance between a melon and a human head. Several other foods are associated with having brains, including a cabbage, a gourd, and even a...
Chad in Hilliard, Florida, wonders about the expression old as Methuselah, meaning “extremely advanced in years.” The phrase references Methuselah, a figure in Jewish, Islamic, and Christian tradition said to be 969 years old when he...
The phrase This ain’t my first rodeo, meaning “This isn’t my first time” or “I already have experience with this” goes back at least as far as the 1981 Joan Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest, where Faye Dunaway as...
When you’re talking about the location of an inanimate object, is it okay to say that it lives there, as in The peanut butter lives in that cabinet or The flashlight lives on that shelf? Strictly speaking, of course, that object isn’t...