Maybe I've watched The Godfather too often, but whenever I do somebody a favor, and he or she says something like "However can I repay you for this," I'm tempted to respond: "Some day... and that day may never come... I'm gonna call upon you to do a service for me."
Anything to do with hats is great: "Talking through your hat" "Mad as a hatter" — this one is frankly... "...Old hat" "I'll eat my hat if..." "My hat's off to..." "A(n) [individual] of many hats" — my favourite reply to this was from the missus: "Um... you only own one hat." It's fun to use deformed phrases... "Hair of the truck that hit you." "Piss in one hand, shit in the other. See which one fills up first." Usually abbr. to the first sentence: Well piss in one hand, shit in the other, right?
"A rising tide lifts all boats." We use this in the industry constantly. Particularly now as we enter another post-Covid business boom with sales records being broken nearly every week. Suddenly, you start to think that all the things that might have been wrong with the business were mirages. That you were overthinking things or being overly-critical or flinching at shadows. I mean, there's a line out the door, so there must not be anything wrong, right? Wrong! It's just a boom cycle, and thinking like that will dull your mojo. The same shit is wrong today that was wrong yesterday. Just guess business is good doesn't mean the product doesn't need improvement.
I've always been fascinated by the "water" model for finance - underwater, slush fund, liquid assets, float a loan, cash flow, underwater pricing, frozen assets, sinking fund, capital drain, take a bath, bank, currency... Those are the only ones I can think of right now.
I like this one a lot. It's talking about how North Korea turns off the power at night: The Pyongchon eating district extinguished as they drove through it, and then one, two, three, the housing blocks along Haebangsan Street went black. Nighty-night, Pyongyang. You earned it. No nation sleeps as North Korea sleeps. That final line . . . It's succinct but says so much, more than that paragraph can hold. I suppose it's using personification (an epistrophe too because of the phrase endings), but I'm impressed with how subdued the style is in that last line. I feel like I could write a thousand words on it. Anyway, it's the quiet flourishes that impress me most. It has the (seemingly) minimal effort of elegance. I wish I could do that.
A long time ago, I translated an anime called Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto - Natsu no Sora. The name translates to "Things Precious to a Mage - Summer Sky". The main character is called "Sora" (i.e. Sky) and it documents her summer where she leaves her home in the countryside to learn to use magic. She dies of heart disease at the end of that summer, after she graduates from mage school. I thought the title was one of the most beautiful I've ever come across.
I remember a civil rights activist responding to that by saying. "It doesn't lift the boats that are tied to the dock. Those boats get swamped." He went on to compare those boats to people who are unemployed or in minimum wage jobs and not benefiting from economic successes enjoyed by the rich. I think he had a point there.
I've always liked the expression, 'the camera loves her', but it took watching Lauren German in Lucifer before I really understood what it meant.
Sacred feces! Oh, dung! Consume feces and expire Perform self-fornication and my favorite... I would suggest that you perform an airborne fornication whilst intersecting a rotating breakfast pastry.
Back in the Marines our phrase for "thingamajig" or "whtchmacallit" was "the motherfucking goddamn goddamn." Back home on leave once I pointed to the salt and asked my dad "Could you pass the motherfucking goddamn goddamn please?" He was unimpressed with my command of idiom.
To describe someone as being useless: 'Like a fart in a colander because they don't know which hole to go through.'
