Not a southern saying: I ain't in no ways tiiiyuuuurrrrd.
Posted on 03/02/2023 10:26:46 AM PST by fidelis
As to #14 - that is a grade of cotton, equivalent to medium/average.
I often wonder about some phrases. “Bob’s your uncle” is one that I often hear and I’m not sure what it means.
What does “Crazier than a democRAT” mean? It means something that does not exist like “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow”.
Well, if that don’t take the rag off the bush!
To “take the rag off the bush” means “to excel, to be the best or most triumphantly successful.” Used in an ironic sense, it means “to be breathtakingly outrageous” or, in the current vernacular, “to take the cake” (“You do take the rag off the bush, boy,” R. Coover, 1977). It can also mean “to put an end to an argument or contest through overwhelming victory.” This is actually the sense in which the phrase is used in one of its earliest appearances in print, in 1810 (“This ‘takes the rag off the bush’ so completely, that we suppose we shall hear no more … about the Chesapeake business.”) “To take the rag off the bush” is definitely of US origin, and was probably first used in the 18th century.
That US origin is important, because if you go looking for the origin of “take the rag off the bush” on the internet, you’ll find rather long and involved explanations that trace the phrase to Ireland or Scotland and a folk tradition of tying rags to bushes near religious shrines. It is said, for instance, that at a shrine to Saint Patrick in Ireland emigrants bound for America in the 18th and 19th centuries tied bits of cloth to a nearby bush to solicit Saint Patrick’s favor in their journey and future endeavors. If the cloth disappeared from the bush soon after the person set sail, it meant that good fortune had been granted (or, according to other accounts, that disaster had struck).
This story about rags and bushes is, in itself, true. There is a long tradition in Celtic (and other) cultures of “rag bushes,” often located at religious shrines or wells known for their healing powers, and supplicants do indeed tie bits of cloth to these bushes or trees to solicit aid or health. At medicinal wells and springs, for instance, it is said that as the “rag” weathers away, the affliction itself will fade.
But these “rag bushes” are almost certainly not the source of “take the rag off the bush.” For a far more likely source, we turn to the American frontier and its nearly omnipresent guns. It was common in the 18th and 19th centuries to hold impromptu shooting matches where the target was simply a rag hung on a bush in the distance. A good shot would hit the rag, making it visibly jump. A great shot would literally “take the rag off the bush,” putting an end to at least that round of the contest with an overwhelming success.
Making this sort of shooting match the likely source of “take the rag off the bush” is the fact that it fits perfectly with “triumphant success” sense of the earliest examples we have of the phrase in print. One of these examples, from 1843, specifically refers to a shooting match, and none of them mention religious shrines. There is, on the other hand, no scenario I can imagine involving “rag bushes” that would produce the “stunning triumph” or “take the cake” meanings of “take the rag off the bush.” Finally, although the phrase has been widely used in the US for at least two centuries, it is virtually unknown outside the US.
Drunk as Cooter Brown.
Bless your heart.
Raining like a cow pi**ing on a flat rock.
Not a southern saying: I ain't in no ways tiiiyuuuurrrrd.
So we still don’t know what in the Sam Hill the phrase Sam Hill is from? Well butter my mutt and call me a biscuit.
In reference to an expensive item.
That’s higher than Willie Nelson
On #15, “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise”, an alternate origin refers to the Creek Indians of Alabama
https://www.sunherald.com/living/article160316974.html
Only “odd” to Yankees and stuffy ‘academics.’
I had a boss, from Hernando MS, who used to say: “I’m busier than if I had a cat covered in shit on a marble floor”
I agree, its not a phrase that has reached common parlance
One of my favorites:
Bless his heart. If you took his brain out and put it on the head of a pin, it would roll around like a BB on a six-lane highway.
WFTD PING!..............
REM spent a lot of time explaining what ‘losing my religion’ meant. My dad would say he was ‘about to lose my religion’ sometimes when he was especially frustrated with something.
“Busier than a cat in a cow pasture”
“Nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”..............
One of my co-workers likes to say, “I’m busier’n a one-legged man in an @$$-kicking contest.”
Maybe that's just a Jacksonville thing.
Heck, the only one we didn’t use was number 8 up north- all the rest were part of everyday speak-
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