Do you have any odd sayings and their meanings?

A sheet is a sail on a boat or ship.

When a ship has three jibs sheeted to the wind, it is being held sideways to wind and waves in strong storm conditions with very high waves, causing it to roll like someone who is drunk.

^Mmkay, but do you have any odd sayings you want to share?

My kid and I have a personal one. We both tend to veer from the point (stop rolling your eyes, @chyna)! and tell back stories, so now we simply say “Lightning fast thought pattern” to avoid blathering on, seemingly off-topic.

Oh, and sorry, @zenvelo, but “sheets” here doesn’t refer to sails, it refers to the ropes that trim the sails. If you don’t trim properly on a multi-sailed boat, (meaning the sheets are loose) both the sails and the boat kind of flop about aimlessly.

“Straight from the horse’s mouth.” It means you heard it first hand. I’ve spent a good amount of time with horses. They are much too intelligent to bother talking to humans.

Dickens points out that saying someone is as “dead as a door nail” is a kind of silly simile.

On the other hand, “happy as a pig in shit” is pretty unambiguous.

“Happy as a clam.”
Originally, it’s “Happy as a clam in high water.” When the tide is in, clams are safe.
I use the expression “Clappy as a ham”, which was first used on the Bosom Buddies show.

In the movie Tombstone, the expression wrongly used is “I’m your huckleberry.”
Originally, the expression is “You’re a persimmon, and I’m a huckleberry!”, which means I’m just a bit better.

Happy as a baby in a barrel full of boobs!

“Like snaw off a dyke”. Like snow melting from a drystone wall. Describes something that disappears quickly.

The more you know you know you know, the less you know you know (you know?).

“Cool as a moose, and twice as hairy.”

I’ve been using this for years. It basically means that something is great but a bit out of the ordinary.

-White Elephant
-Saying uncle when you can’t take it anymore.

There are so many.

There was a series about how various sayings came to be. My husband loved it being foreign born and English is his second language. Sayings often trip up people using a second language, because so many of them don’t seem to make any sense.

History Channel’s Secret Slang. https://play.history.com/shows/americas-secret-slang#episodes

Thank you @JLeslie. That looks like a fun show. I’ll look at it tonight.
And I never thought about how hard it is on people from other countries trying to figure out what we are talking about.

“Well, shit the bed!” Poignant. And hilarious!

“Turn it upside down and call it art” was something my Ex used to say.

One I never understood but used to hear people say was “Fuckin’ A!”

“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit”—Disbelief