I like to play with idioms and sayings, and sometimes come up with new ones. The saying ‘my hovercraft is full of eels’ is very useful to know in a variety of languages, and here are some idioms based on this phrase that I was inspired to come up with this week, plus a few others I made up:
Alternatives for ‘a sandwich short of a picinc‘, meaning that someone is lacking in intelligence:
– a few eels short of a hovercraft
– he has eels in his hovercraft
– a few penguins short of a hatstand
– a few fish short of a lawn mower
Alternatives to ‘as easy as falling off a log‘, meaning that something is easy to do:
– as easy as filling a hovercraft with eels
– like eels to a hovercraft
– like ducks to custard
Alternatives to ‘it’s raining cats and dogs‘, meaning that it’s raining heavily:
– it’s raining hovercrafts and eels
– it’s raining buckets and sticks (a reference to the stick and bucket dance – Discworld fans might get this)
Antonyms of ‘as clear as crystal‘, meaning that it is not obvious and/or easy to understand:
– as clear as custard
– as clear as mud
Do you ever come up with new idioms and sayings?
We say “clear as mud” in AE–often as a question, when you realize you’re not being understood: “Clear as mud, huh?”
One that all my friends used at Waikato University in the mid 1980s, but that I have never heard elsewhere, was “sucked the kumara” – meaning dead or broken. Equivalent to “kicked the bucket”. Kumara is a Māori word for a kind of sweet potato grown in New Zealand.
e.g.
My Dad sucked the kumara in 1990, he was only 54.
Windows Update sucked the kumara and I’m considering reinstalling Windows.
I still like to use it occasionally, but no one ever knows what I mean, especially now I live in the UK where no one even knows what a kumara is.
One immediately comes to mind… one of my sisters came up with it, and it features the other sister’s nickname, so I can’t publish it…