In a couple weeks, I’ll be participating in a murder mystery for a friend’s birthday. I received my bio today, and I’ll be playing a retired Victorian colonel who may or may not be addicted to opium.
Anyway, according to my bio:
However, I think it would be better to use idioms that don’t really make any sense. Something that sounds like a real idiom, but when you think about it you go “wait, what?”
I’m not as creative, so give us your best!
I’d steal from Terry Pratchett, who slid more than a few idioms sideways. I’m only remembering a couple off hand.
The leopard can’t change his shorts.
We’ve passed a lot of water over the bridge since then.
It’s like catching eels in December.
Never meddle in the the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
A stopped clock never boils.
“It’s an old road that nobody wants to hoe.”
“Once rotten, twice ripe, as my dear old mother used to say.”
Or if you want your character to have pretensions to erudition, you could try misquoting Polonius from Hamlet. “Neither a burglar nor a lender be. Give every man thy tongue, but few thy ear. Beware of entrance to a quarry.”
John Caldwell’s “Well that’s ice in the old urinal.”
You can lead Zoid to opium but you cant make her stop
A bird in the bush is worth two in the hand
Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart is a character from Dr. Who.
Here are some of his quotes:
Oh, dear. Women. Not really my field.
The situation is normal, and it doesn’t get much worse than that.
You know, just once I’d like to meet an alien menace that wasn’t immune to bullets.
Er, well, a fifty foot monster can’t swim up the Thames and attack a large building without some people noticing.But you know what politicians are like
“Well, I’d say that’s better than a Scotsman’s ham!”
“Rather a long trouser, don’t you think?”
“Better hump it while the sun shines, my boy!”
My favorite: That TV ain’t gonna watch itself.
Even better: “A bird in the bush is worth two in the bosom.” (Sounding vaguely obscene is a bonus.)
“I guess the foot’s on the other hand now!”
I’ll just offer one that I used to say accidentally and now say deliberately.
“Well, that puts a monkey in the wrench!”
It’s six of one, a dozen of the other.
Slower than molasses in May.
How very touchwarming!
From CHARADE:
Audrey Hepburn: Well, wasn’t it Shakespeare that said, “When strangers do meet in far off lands, they should e’er long see each other again”?
Cary Grant: Shakespeare never said that!
Audrey Hepburn: How do you know?
Cary Grant: It’s terrible!
My uncle used to say “Buenos roaches”.
How about:
I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobectomy.
In one rear and out the other.
Opinions are like assholes: you put two opinions in a room, you get three assholes.
If wishes were liches, beggars would die.
Whining isn’t everything.
Squeeze the day!
I know some recipes for cocktails that would pop the pennies off the eyelids of a dead Mexican.
(NB: The original line in The Philadelphia Story was “a dead Irishman.”)
Adios, muchacho, via con carne!