Sternvogel beat me to it, zoog, but let me add my welcome to the Boards! Been lurking long, or did you jump right in? Whatever, I’m sure you’ll enjoy time spent here. Do you, um, have any hamster food handy?
A few sayings I’ve picked up over the years:
He could fuck up a two car funeral.
He’s so dumb he thinks Roe v Wade refers to alternative methods of crossing the Potomac.
Hotter than a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire.
crazy as a peach orchard boar
She’s uglier than forty miles of bad road on a wet night.
That guy could screw up a bowl of corn flakes.
That guy’s brain is so small you could cram it up an ant’s ass and it would still rattle like a BB in a boxcar.
There was a great news story I read a few years ago about the administrator of a company in Oxfordshire, England. She was well-liked by her colleagues, but they didn’t necessarily respect her abilities. In fact they regularly told her that she “couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery”.
To get her own back, she arranged for the company’s Christmas party to be held at Brakspear’s Brewery in Henley-on-Thames. She coordinated with the brewery and her coworkers, and arranged a bus to take the employees to the party. Unfortunately for her, when the bus arrived at the venue, they found that she had in fact booked the party for the following week, thus proving their assertion.
People have more fun than anybody, except horses, and they can’t!
Imagine hearing Frances Sternhagen, who read the first (I think) unabridged audio version of this book, saying this with a very broad down-east accent. I always loved hearing her say it, because it was such an utter non-sequitur!
To answer your implied question, the examples you use would more properly be called “similes”. A colloquialism is more related to a regional expression, such as “termination dust”, which is what we Alaskans call the first snow on the mountain tops.
colloquialism from around here:
piss ant (often said as one word about someone/thing that’s really annoying you)
similies i’ve liked, and other sayings:
older than dirt
dumber than dirt
if brains were leather, he couldn’t saddle a bug (thanks to Maverick the TV series)
happy as a clam at high tide
i’m so happy here i could just shit (usually refers to being at work)
just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you
a couple bricks short of a load
You couldn’t cuss a cat in here without getting fur in your mouth.
or
Not enough room to swing a cat. (I would guess this derives from a cat o’ nine tails.)
Well…no. The definition is a comparison of two unlike things, usually connected by as or like. So technically, one would have to say something on the order of “Cheeks like roses”. Your example of “hotter than hell” is just a straightforward comparison.
