100 Words, Uncategorized, Weather, Words

So They Say

85 Comments

It was terribly foggy the other day. There is a saying out here that when it is foggy in the fall or winter, we will have snow in three days, three weeks, or three months.  Well that is a pretty safe bet and leaves a lot of room for fudging.  “Yep, remember that fog we had in early December?  See, its snowing” (in mid February)!

I love hearing sayings like this. It seems to me that they are ways to make sense of the universe,  even if they aren’t really true.

What are some of your favorite  sayings,  colloquialisms, and euphemisms?  Can you make up some new ones?

85 thoughts on “So They Say”

  1. I love playing with words, I predict a lively day on the trail. To start us off, here’s an old adage that has been updated by some witty person to reflect a slightly different sentiment: It’s the early bird that gets the worm, but the second mouse that gets the cheese. 🙂

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  3. I’ve trotted out some of my favorite colloquialisms here on the Trail previously (best horse in the glue factory, etc.) and in the last four years it seems like we’ve exhausted all the euphemisms for someone being mentally incompetent, so I don’t have anything new to offer in that respect.
    What I do have is something that came to me in a dream. It’s a title. It could be the title of a story or a book or a movie or a Broadway musical but it came to me in my dream unattached to any such content. I guess I’ve always been better at naming products than developing them.
    Anyway, here’s the title:

    ELVIATHAN!
    A Christmas Juggernaut

    Plots anyone?

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  5. What goes around comes around.

    Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans

    Dogs come when they’re called; cats take a message and get back to you.

    Although not an aphorism, I love the phrase “God willing and the creek don’t rise”. We’ve learned lately that a lot of awful stuff can happen whether the creek rises or not…

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  7. I’m having a time differentiating between quotes and aphorisms; here’s what the Firefox search engine comes up with:

    “Aphorism is a statement of truth or opinion expressed in a concise and witty manner. The term is often applied to philosophical, moral, and literary principles.

    To qualify as an aphorism, it is necessary for a statement to contain a truth revealed in a terse manner. Aphoristic statements are quoted in writings, as well as in our daily speech. The fact that they contain a truth gives them a universal acceptance. Scores of philosophers, politicians, writers, artists, sportsmen, and other individuals are remembered for their famous aphoristic statements.

    Aphorisms often come with a pinch of humor, which makes them more appealing to the masses. Proverbs, maxims, adages, and clichés are different forms of aphoristic statements that gain prevalence from generation to generation and frequently appear in our day-to-day speech.”

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    1. Alexander McCall Smith has a character in his 44 Scotland Street series, a nun with a very long, run on name, who speaks only in aphorisms. It is such a hoot.

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  10. If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

    Nothing defines the past four years more than that one—USA will be undergoing flea treatments for years to come.

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  16. So how do memes fit into our conversation today because I have a new favorite this year. “The phrase ‘hindsight is 2020’ was a saying left to us by a future time traveler that we have seriously misunderstood.”

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      1. So how do memes fit into our conversation today because I have a new favorite this year. “The phrase ‘hindsight is 2020’ was a saying left to us by a future time traveler that we have seriously misunderstood.”!

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      1. That was fun. And I’m happy to report that all of my years here have worn off. I came up with Minneapolis and Des Moines and Rockford and Milwaukee as my four cities of influence. Not Missouri.

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    1. I have two couples, our friends, who moved to the Great Hot dry swamp of Phoenix. They always say people there sound like Minnesotans. I point out to the they spend all their time around Minnesotans.

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  20. When I took the quiz, several questions were difficult because more than one reply seemed right. My result pointed to Des Moines as a city where they talk like me. That’s 29 miles south of where I spent the first 18 years.

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    1. Ditto on the “more than one reply seemed right.” I attribute mine to having spent my first nine years her married to a man from Long Island, my first couple of years in Wyoming, and the subsequent four in Southern Illinois. My results were all over the map, including two cities I’ve never even been to, but featuring Minneapolis/St. Paul as my primary pattern, which obviously makes sense.

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      1. I also think, though, that many folks in MN and the Dakota have a Northern European lingustic heritage that you can still detect.

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      2. I have spoken on here before of Earl Armstrong, my second employer in the US. He was the watchmaker at the Base Exchange at F.E. Warren Air Base. A sweet and lovely man, whose care and friendship lasted until he died. I was in “regular” contact with him via phone for years. At one point, after I had been in Minnesota for a few years, he commented that I sounded like a Minnesotan. Apparently I sounded different than I did when I worked for him, which, of course, isn’t that surprising, especially considering that I had been in the US only about six months when I started working for him.

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  21. In the category of sort of new and made up sayings (I don’t remember where it came from):
    “You’ve buttered your bread and now you’ll have to sleep in it.”

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  22. Sometimes The New Yorker magazine prints sentences from actual current news items under the heading “Stop That Metaphor!”. The items are, of course, replete with metaphors . I will see if I can find some tonight

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    1. Actually, it is “Block That Metaphor!” and I can’t find any examples. Husband culled the magazine basket recently. I did find this, though

      Correction of the Week from the Financial Times

      “An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the ‘Salt Lake Tribune’ has a full-time jazz reporter. It in fact has two reporters who cover Utah Jazz, the local basketball team.”

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  23. It’s my belief that the saying “Starve a cold, feed a fever” is misinterpreted. People usually think it means you should eat if you have a cold and not eat if you have a fever. I think, though, that’s it’s not meant that way, but as a warning – if you have a cold and you don’t eat, you’re going to make it worse and you’ll end up with a fever. If you’re sick, you should always eat, at least that’s my humble opinion.

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  24. There’s a YouTuber farm family I watch. ‘Cole the Cornstar’, His dad, Daddy Cornstar is pretty funny and he mixes up a lot of things. My favorite so far is when he said “You Gotta grab the bull by the tonsils”.

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  25. When I was at the U and the tiny linguistics department was courting me to switch to a linguistics degree, I was invited to a small event where a man expert in MN accents spoke. He listened to each of us read a paragraph he wrote. To me he said, raised by Germans, one or more likely to have German as an original language. Probably from NE MN, not Duluth, not the Range, so that left the North Shore. But without any Scandinavian vowels, he could not be sure. Well, that nailed it.
    Funny thing was when my diploma came it said my degree was in linguistics. Everywhere else in their records it says the correct degree. Oh, if I had only listened to them and not been a teacher.

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      1. Computer programming is a language. Soon after I started teaching there was a rising demand for linguists.
        This will be anonymous. I cannot manage WordPress for iPad.

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  26. I have spoken too often on here about my mother and her sayings, phrases, aphorisms, or whatever you call them. My mother spoke in a very clear, measured, precise, usage-correct English. She did not correct us that much, but my sister and I both picked that up. Usage instruction in school, what most people call grammar, incorrectly if we are using linguistics terms correctly, drove me nuts. I told my senior English teacher, who I could talk to that way (Yes, I know that is supposed to WHOM, but WHOM is all but dead, and so be it) that it bored me. He said, and this is one reason I seldom taught usage, that it bored the kids who had good usage and made no impact on those wo didn’t.

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  28. This is late enough in the day that few people will see it, I hope, but I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to post this:
    “There was a homeless man with no arms who came to the church begging for a job and when he said he could ring the bell in the tower, the priest agreed and gave him a chance. The next day he heard the bell ringing and went up to see how the armless man did it. The man was hitting the bell with his head. The priest tried to talk him out of it but the man was too proud.
    One day, just after noon, the armless man was so dizzy after ringing the bell that he fell out the window to his death. A passing couple saw the now famous, but deceased, man on the grass and one asked who is that man? The other answered, “I don’t know his name, but his face rings a bell”
    The next week the man’s twin brother – also armless – approached the priest and said he wanted the job. Despite the priests reservations, the man said he felt he had to do it to honor his sibling. Finally the priest relented and soon enough, the brother was dead on the lawn under the bell tower. A passer by asked “Oh no! Who is that?” The companion replied: I don’t know but he’s a dead ringer for his brother.”

    I apologize, and now I’m going to bed.

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