My mom’s favorite expression was “better than a slap in the face with a wet fish” sometimes the wet fish was replaced with a limp noodle. I get it, but I don’t…
The expression of hers that I hated the most was “Just a mo”. It was her universal answer for anything involving time.
“Mom, when are we leaving?” “Just a mo”
“Mom, how long until we arrive?” “Just a mo”
“Mom, when will dinner be ready?” “Just a mo”
I can confirm that a “mo” was almost never less than 5 minutes and frequently up to half an hour or even an hour.
When asking my mother, “What is that thing?” and if it was something she didn’t want to actually explain, I’d get the answer, “A wigwam for a goose’s bridle”.
Or going somewhere that she didn’t want to divulge, “Going to see a man about a dog”.
And quickly back to the ‘spend a penny’ example, when I was very young (under 6) the female public toilets in the CBD in Melbourne, Australia, had attendants who you needed to pay threepence before you went into a cubicle. Men could use the dunny free of charge.
My Dad (West Virginian by way of East Tennessee) had some, well, idiosyncratic turns of phrase. The most colorful and peculiar ones I remember are:
“It’s so good you can’t sit still and eat it!”
“As easy as shittin’ the bed wide awake.”
And there was one he often had call to use with me when I was a teenage know-it-all with a mouth as smart as I thought* I* was at the time: He’d call me a “sexual intellectual” --i.e., a fucking smart-ass.
Never have I heard anyone else say any of those things.
