How very timely. Last week my 14 year-old son was heading onto the ice as goalie for his team. I mention the goalie part only because its a pivotal position and goalies often do a bunch of mental preparation. Anyway, his coach says “You know Rick, yes, the goalie instructor?” My son adores Rick and responds, somewhat cautiously, “Yeah, why?” The middle-aged Coach replies “Rick has moved onto greener pastures.”
My son was shocked,“Oh my god, Rick died?”.
Pause. “No, he’s fine … he got a better job.”
My son thought to himself, “Well, Jesus H Christ, why didn’t you say so?” The game started shortly after and he proceeded to let in 5 straight goals.
Something similar I heard once from a coworker was “slicker than a cat’s ass on a doorknob.” I asked what the hell that meant, and he replied, “Ever see a cat sitting on a doorknob? Course not. Ass is too slick.”
My father used to use quite a few of these phrases, though his proverbial witch wore a cast-iron bra. ( Brrrrrrrr! )
I also recall the “dead as a doornail” phrase was used in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It might not have been the earliest use of the phrase, but it’s one of the more prominent ones, I think.
If nothing else, this topic helped me recall some fond memories of my dad. Thank you!
Slicker 'n Snail Shit was one I’ve heard before. I guess the alliteration sounds better. Besides, Owls are better known for horking up pellets full of bones and hair.
@Alastory we use Baltic in Ireland also to describe freezing temperatures.
Thinking of the weather I’m not sure if it’s raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock, or raining like pouring piss out of a boot. A well, potato tomato
As a USAian, I reject the premise that these are British phrases. I know all of them, and have used many of them. Only “knickers” and “doornail” seem British on their face, and the latter only if you know that it was used by Dickens.
Random note about “put a sock in it”. I don’t know if many people know where that came from. In the era before phonographs we’re electric, when they were purely mechanical and acoustic - the old crank up victrola sand outside horn gramophones, they were way louder than you’d expect if you’ve never heard one before in person. And there was literally no volume control on most of them. The ones that did have a volume control literally had a physical device to plug the horn. The way to reduce the volume if you didn’t have a model like that was to literally stuff a sock or similar bit of cloth into the horn! I have owned a couple different cylinder and disc phonographs and can attest to this.
Edit: Just thinking about this - acoustic wind up phonographs we’re pretty much obsolete by the mid 1940s. Having been replaced by electric players with volume controls. My dad is in his 80s and has lived his entire life in the time after acoustic phonographs were obsolete. There is at this point almost no one alive who would have ever seen someone (other than antique nerds like myself) put a sock in a phonograph. It’s no surprise that the phrase would be dying out. Its amazing it held out this long.
In the film Catch 22 there is a passing scene in which someone is literally flogging their dead horse… probably as frustrating as being caught in a Catch 22… the Klinger dilemma… a useless pursuit.
Baltic Sea – almost as cold as the unheated, beachside lido we visited from a Durham primary school (I cannot remember exactly where it was but the wind whistling over the surface came direct from the Baltic).
We’ve never had a well dug in winter, but a contractor did come out to update a septic system in February.
The ground was frozen too hard on the first attempt, as a tooth was actually broken off their backhoe(!), forcing them to wait for temperatures to rise closer to freezing.
I keep waiting for “dialing a phone number” to die as well. I’m a fan of retro, but I probably haven’t touched a rotary dial this century.
There’s a whole lot of obsolete tech in our zeitgeist that is just going to confuse the hell out of future generations. The icon for voicemail is a pictoglyph of a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which hasn’t been a thing since Radio Shack died. The phone icon has a curved handpiece and cups for ears and mouth; similarly tied to the age of wired phones. Will the future understand why a contact list has Rolodex™ tabs? A camera has a viewfinder prism bump on the top? A network diagram has 10-base-T coax and terminating resistors? Who still organizes their data in “files” stored in “folders”? Why would a notepad need lines?
Phrases aren’t the only things in “danger” of dying out due to obsolescence. There’s plenty of other anachronisms that deserve an equal fate.
My dear granny used to say “it must be gonna rain, ‘cause the turd-birds are whistling.” I still have no clue if that’s a thing nobody else in the world had ever said or if it’s some back woods Appalachian farmer slang. I also have no idea what it means, since she said it under a great many different circumstances.
Brrrrrrrr! 
