STOP THAT LANGUAGE! It’s evolving!
Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue [1811] is pretty good reading. Archive has it.
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It was so cold, I saw two dogs with jumper cables trying to start a rabbit.
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The classics never go out of style. 
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The variant of this where I grew up was “My wisdom teeth are floating”.
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I’m from north east England. Sometimes we cut our phrases short but not in a cockney/London sense. Does anyone know what, “it’s a bit george” means? How about, “it’s baltic”?
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I’ll be as happy as a pig in shit! It’s ‘toe the line’, if I’m not mistaken, as in running a race, everyone’s toes have to be on the start-line.
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An “oldie” by Johnny Carson:
Audience (prompted by JC): “How cold was it?”
JC: “Today I saw a witch wearing a thermal bra.”
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Chief Guard: Are you able to see the white line painted on the floor directly behind you, Six-Double-Five-Three-Two-One?
Alex: Yes, sir.
Chief Guard: Then your toes belong on the OTHER side of it!
clockwork orange
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A tech at work used to hit me with this whenever I asked him about the progress of work: “Don’t get your panties in a bunch.”
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Watching Futurama I laughed hard when Hermes Conrad got upset with Zoidberg and said “Cram it … umm … cram it wherever your people traditionally cram things!”
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This is all slicker than owl shit.
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Judging by my own wardrobe that would be about 2°C. (Ok, so don’t have actual thermal bras, but I rarely go out without extra layers when it’s less than 2°!)
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A “flash in the pan” refers to Ye Olde Muskets misfiring.
To fire a flintlock musket, you first pour gunpowder down the barrel, drop the musket ball in, and tamp it into place with the ramrod. Then you prime the pan by half-cocking the gun, opening a little pan-shaped container above the “lock” (the lock is the mechanism holding the trigger, as in “lock, stock, and barrel”), dropping a pinch of gunpowder into the pan and closing it. The gun is now “locked and loaded”. When you want to fire the gun, you fully cock it by pulling the cock all the way up, then pull the trigger. A spring snaps the cock forward, striking a chunk of flint into a striker (called the frizzen) which opens the cover of the pan, creating a shower of sparks that lights the primer charge. That little flash is supposed to travel through a small hole in the lock to light the powder inside the barrel, shooting the bullet. But sometimes it’s dirty, wet, or plugged, and the gun doesn’t fire. All you see is a useless “flash in the pan.”
“Flash in the pan” hasn’t been particularly relevant since the invention of the modern self-contained cartridge bullet over a hundred and fifty years ago.
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So, the modern equivalent would be something like “cheap rimfire ammo 'coz Biden” ?
I thought Colder than a witch’s tit had been immortalized by A Catcher in the Rye. But maybe folks don’t read that anymore.
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Haha, it’s the same but more misogynistic
/s
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It’s from the age of cannon-armed ships. A brass monkey holds cannonballs. Freezing conditions could dislodge cannonballs–quite literally freezing the balls off a brass monkey.
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Except they didn’t keep cannonballs on deck like that, if they did the frames weren’t brass, and the thermal expansion co-efficient wouldn’t have differential shrinkage which would do that in any case.
The evidence is that “brass monkeys” referred to literal statues of monkeys made of brass. If it was very hot, then it might be hot enough to scald the hair of a monkey. If it were to scald the hair off a brass monkey, it would be very hot indeed. Similarly, if it were cold enough to freeze the tail off a monkey, then freezing the tail off a brass monkey would be quite frigid. Both of these terms are noted well before the first attestation of “freezing the balls off…”, which seems a normal extrapolation from the frozen tail.
The balls involved were never those of a cannon. Unless, metaphorically, it was an exceptional monkey, I suppose.
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