A.Word.A.Day -- AWADmail Issue 1053

“Box of Kleenex version.” My friend Phil is a retired scientist, educator, and textbook author. We have ongoing conversations about the process of writing and editing and rewriting. This phrase of his refers to the final product which, he said, “is so good it makes you cry while you’re reading it.”
-Lee Barker, Redmond, Oregon (barkerbass bendcable.com)

When I was young, I saw my younger brother being bullied. Infuriated, I ripped up handfuls of grass and threw it at the bullies. Thus the term “grass-throwing mad” was born: an ineffectual yet heartfelt response to an infuriating situation!
-RoseAnne Mussar, Ottawa, Canada (rose mussar.com)

As children, when we did things that were “passed the limit” (or anyone for that matter) my mom would always say, “That’s too much sugar for a dime!”
-Pat Alvarado, Miami, Florida (piggybooks yahoo.com)

The way you rear your pup is the way you’ll have your dog. (A saying from my dad.)
-Norbert McDermott (nmcd nmcdermott.com)

Some years ago, when I was working for a bank, my department manager asked me to look into the possibility of pulling certain data from our records. I investigated and found that this would involve a lot of time and effort to produce inconsistent, unreliable results. When I explained this to the manager, he replied, “Don’t waste your time. You’d be pιssing up a rope.”
I was not offended by the metaphor but it struck me that it was not one I myself would have thought to use. I, personally, am anatomically incapable of doing any such thing up a rope, even if I wanted to.
-SarahRose Werner, Saint John, Canada (swerner nbnet.nb.ca)

When dealing with a seemingly impossible situation -- often bureaucratic -- I like to refer to it as “a real bring-me-the-witch’s-broom experience.”
-Capt. Richard Bailey, Wellfleet, Massachusetts (hms-rose comcast.net)

The one I’ve “coined” is a mild inversion of a well-known trope. Oddly, when I say of two similar items “It’s half of one and six dozen of the other,” most people don’t even notice. Same when I say of a task, “It isn’t rocket surgery.” Nine times out of 10, it just scoots on by.
-Neil Tesser, Chicago, Illinois (ressetn aol.com)

A phrase that hurts me to hear is: kill two birds with one stone. In times like these with so much killing and destruction and with so many species in trouble and environmental degradation on the rise, I wince and have actually had tears come to my eyes when I hear that phrase. So whenever I hear it, I will say, we need use the phrase “feed two birds with one hand.”
-Bernadine Ann, Portland, Oregon (bernadineloves gmail.com)

I don’t know what category this fits into, but in my family we occasionally quote my great uncle who as a boy had said of some pending event, “We are on the edge of the brink!”
-Chuck Cole, Evanston, Illinois (seecee913 gmail.com)

In my family, we still use an idiom coined/twisted by one of my nephews, who loved crackers, when he was a toddler. If we are doing something at sunrise, we still refer to it as “the cracker dawn”.
-Dottie Baker, West Jefferson, North Carolina (dbaker996 gmail.com)

I’m reminded of the story told of the early days of computer translation of English to Russian where the input was “out of sight, out of mind”. The actual translation of the phrase is apparently С глаз долой, из сердца вон (S glaz doloy, iz serdtsa von), but the computer, not knowing it was an idiomatic phrase, responded with Cлепой, безумный (slepoy, bezumnyy), which is “blind, insane”.
-Sam Long, Springfield, Illinois (gunputty comcast.net)

The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak translated into Russian became the alcohol is fine but the meat is rotten.
-Vikram Hukmani, Baltimore, Maryland (vikhuk engineer.com)