Here’s a new one for those in other countries to try and match:
“Don’t be such a wet blanket” or “She threw a wet blanket on the whole project”
Now, what does it mean? LOL! A wet blanket puts out a fire and it is heavy. So it means you are a downer (Debbie downer, yet another US phrase!) or that you quashed (voided, ruined, stopped) something. Being a downer (wet blanket) also means you are very negative and are taking all the joy out of something.
Similar phrase: He put the kibosh on it. But that phrase is actually more correct and not really slang.
@Commulinks as a small child, any time my grandmother would help pull a shirt off over my head (like taking off pajamas to get dressed) she would say “skin the rabbit”. I never caught on to the real origin of that phrase until much, much later. But she grew up on a farm, so I’m sure she never even thought about it. And honestly, the cat version seems worse, because rabbits were a common food years ago.
I’m always late to the game… I have an American saying for you… “The Rabbit Done Died”. 40 years ago when I went to the docs to see if I was pregnant, they had me pee in a cup and sent it off to be tested by what was called “The Rabbit Test”. When the test came back in the nurse told me “The Rabbit Done Died” which meant I was pregnant. Back in the day Female rabbits were injected with urine and that’s how pregnancy tests were performed. I always thought If a person was pregnant the hormones in the urine killed the rabbit. I only recently found out all the rabbits were disected a few days after being injected with the urine and if the rabbits overies had grown, then you were pregnant, so all the rabbits died whether a person was pregnat or not… When Aerosmith’s song “Sweet Emotion” came out, some of the lyrics went “You can’t catch me 'cause the rabbit done died”. According to the sone,that meant he’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant and he had to go on the run from her father.
I have a new one, for all of our foreign friends:
You’ve been hornswaggled!
It means you’ve been swindled, taken for granted, ripped off, deceived of your money. And while hornswaggle is just a word (and I am getting an autocorrect notation on it even though it is a word, spelled correctly), it is a real word with real meaning that, just by sheer coincidence, I have had the displeasure of feeling quite recently.
As a broommaker, I taught kids to sweep their own porch. heres a cool fact, the expression flying off the handle comes from women sweeping vigorously ( dont know about you but I clean when mad or worried or feeling helpless) and because of the way brooms were made, the head did indeed fly off the handle.