Imagine your typical large pitcher of lemonade that you visualize on the lazy summer front porch of your mind. It is full to the top. Now imagine what it would sound and look like holding that pitcher up off the ground 4-5 feet and emptying it onto the ground by pouring it continuously as if to fill a glass (not just turning it over and dumping it).
That’s about what a horse (be it a racehorse or otherwise) taking a piss sounds and looks like. It is not a quiet or brief thing to witness.
One WAG would be that folks not used to witnessing such things are more likely to encounter a racehorse urinating at a racetrack than other varieties of horses doing other horsey things.
At the race track, the winning horse is drug tested. It’s not hard to gather a sample right after the race, because the horse has to…piss like a racehorse.
“Pissing like a plow-horse” would probably convey enough a sharp enough image to cover the high end of the human curve with respect to pressure, volume and overall splashworthiness, but there is reason to suspect that the Old Gray Mare’s athletic cousin might do a tad better, at least on race day. Many racehorses in the U.S. are (or at least were) given the drug Lasix, which is a powerful diuretic. This is an interesting article: Lasix Info about the practice. I doubt that it has anything to do with the idiom, though.
To address the OP, I had no trouble imagining a “beeline” as the shortest distance between two points, until I spent an afternoon watching some bees.
The explanation I heard on an antiques programme was that it came from a flood of German-made cheap tin-plate toys and other knicknacks that were exported to the UK at the end of the 19th century in order to capture kiddie spending power which typically amounted to a penny or so.
“Happy as a lark”- are larks really that happy?
“He’s sitting there like a bump on a log.” Suffice it to say the entire log is just sitting there- why isolate the bump?
“This place is like a zoo” (said of a place that is chaotic and noisy). last time I went to the zoo things were rather quiet and orderly.
So, what would be the appropriate term for a figure of speech which, on close examination, contains some illogical or nonsensical element? I think it’s important to have a word, or at least not to simply dismiss such things under the general heading of “metaphors.” It really does matter. The use of such phrases is, or at least can be, a sign of intellectual/verbal laziness. As George Orwell pointed out in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language” – http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm:
And that applies just as well to speech/writing with no political purpose.
Having grown up in a logging town, I can attest to the fact that logs are actually pretty mobile. They fall, roll, drift down the river, all sorts of stuff.
It is extremely rare for a bump to move relative to the log it’s on, though. The comparison is to other things which sit on logs (like frogs, crows, or sweaty guys eating sandwiches) and can be counted on to move about from time to time.
What about, “the sky was pitch black”? Pitch is black. The sky is black (at night). So far so good. But to say, “The cardinal is pitch red” just doesn’t work, now does it? My favourite, of course, is “pitch white.”
[ul]
[li]“Fit as a fiddle” - nice alliteration, but I’ve not seen a fiddle finish a marathon[/li][li]“Crazy as a bedbug” - by what standardized diagnosis protocol did one arrive at a conclusion of this insects mental health?[/li][li]“As anal about three item lists as OpalCat” - while not popular in people’s parlance, I’m not enough is known about OpalCat’s anus to make a valid comparison.[/li][/ul]
