On the heels of a recent conversation about Southernisms and colloquialisms spurred by my usage of “gullywasher”…
Manfred: I heard something like “gullywarsher” the other day: “Frog strangler.”
Me: Oh yeah? Ha! That must be like a toad choker. Frog strangler, toad choker, gullywasher.
Manfred: I have never heard of any of those.
Me: What are some colloquialisms from where you’re from? I’m sure there are Jersey phrases we don’t use here.
Manfred: I can’t think of any that mean it’s raining. We just say, “It’s FUCKING POURING.”
My favorite Southern expression that I learned when I first moved here is still “colder than a witch’s titty in a brass bra.”
Also, “drunker than Cooter Brown,” though I had to argue with Ian that it was a Southern expression, not something I made up and tried to pass off as such.
More appropriate to our weather today: “Sweating more than a whore in church on Sunday.”
“Tits on a boar” remains my brother’s favorite colloquialism. Although he bitches when he has to explain it to “city” folks.
I’m a fan of the “stupid” idioms — dumber than a screen door on a submarine, a sandwich short of a full picnic, a brick short of a load, a Crayon short of a box, a card short of a full deck (or not playing with a full deck), a few ears short of a bushel, a floor short of a bungalow, couldn’t find his/her way out of a wet paper bag with a map …
Southerners love “bless your/his/her heart” following some insult or criticism. I will always find that weird. I’m sure others just think it’s one of those sweet things Southerners say but listen carefully and you too can see it for what it really is. lol
I think we really need to hear how he says it to get the full gist of that NJ saying.
Haha, I will work on getting a recording.
“Tits on a boar” — that’s new to me. Erica, can you use it in a sentence?!
She’s referring to the phrase “more useless than tits on a boar.”
For example: You are more useless than tits on a boar.
Nick nailed it! Right now, I’m dealing with an insurance company representative who is more useless than tits on a boar.
To get the full and complete extraneous wordage for which we Southroners are duly renowned, you’d have to more precisely say, “useless as tits on a boar hog.” Otherwise, someone might misunderstand and think that you could mean some other sort of boar. Boor. Bore.
Please explain, my dear, to your sweet baboo that the reason we came up with all these colloquialisms all these eons ago is because our mommas would have slapped us down, propped us back up and slapped us down again had we simply said, “It’s fuckin’ POURING out there.” So we had to come up with other ways to express our consternation. Whereas, in Joisey, their mommas just slap them and tell them to shut their fuckin’ mouths and not say fuckin’. Right?
/stereotypical regional insults
Idioms used on a regular basis by my family members include:
* drunk as a bicycle;
* drunker than Hogan’s goat (and no, dunno who’s Hogan or why his goat’s intoxicated);
* kneewalkin’ drunk (detecting a trend here);
* gay as a picnic (which I think is great, because who doesn’t love a picnic? I ask you);
* busier than a one-legged man in a tail-kickin’/busier than a one-armed paper-hanger (still, somehow, disrespectful of the disabled);
* can’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions on the heel (used quite often in this recent goobernatorial primary); and
* dumber’n a bag of hammers/sack of hair/box of rocks.
I should have gone through this comment and sanitized it for LT’s mom’s protection. Ack.
OMG Grandefille, those phrases are so inspiring. I’m going to try to use at least one a week starting now.
It also reminds me of the phrase “I feel like a bag of assholes,” used by me (from Chicago) to mean “I feel like shit.” But Ian, who’s from North Carolina, says “I feel like a sack of buttholes.” Apparently that’s the southern version?
Oh! Or what about “busier’n a cat in a room full of rocking chairs”?!
Ok, I’ll stop now. Sorry.
“more nervous than a cat in a room full of rocking chairs”
I’ve got to look, there is a book somewhere by either Roy Blount or Jeff Foxworthy that gathered a lot of these sayings together.
It’s hard for me to think of these things because they seem so everyday to me that they don’t stick out.
“more holes than a stop sign” always rings true for me. referring to a lie.
“* dumber’n a bag of hammers/sack of hair/box of rocks.”
An old friend of mine used to say “dumber’n a box of roxes,” which I thought was real endearing.
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