More stupid saying

The other day I posted about some of the dumb things that I have heard people say and now it appears to be an epidemic. Maybe it is in my psyche, but now I hear them all of the time.

Like the other day I overheard someone say they would do something “in the drop of a hat”. What does that mean? I assume they mean quickly but what kind of hat are we talking about? Like a sombrero? Or what if it is a top hat? I think those would drop much slower than a baseball cap, which is also a hat. And how high are we dropping said hat from? I mean it could take minutes for a hat to drop from the top of a skyscraper. That’s not an impressive display of speed if you ask me. You always have to take physics into account.

Another one about time is “before they knew what hit them”. Well that’s extremely vague. We could be talking about seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or even years. If you walked into a room that I was in and just hit me from behind that would only be a matter of seconds before I knew what hit me. But what if someone was hit by something and went into a coma. That could be quite a long time. It might be years before they knew what hit them. Is this really the cliché that you want to use when you are trying to convey speed?

Then there are all sort of stupid wagering sayings. Such as “bet your bottom dollar”. Who cares what order it is in, it is still only a dollar. Who cares if it is the bottom dollar, the top dollar or the middle dollar? It is still just a dollar, big deal. Or “dollar to a donut”, what? Aren’t donuts like twenty cents each or something? Is that a deal? And who has the dollar and who had the donut? That’s just stupid.

And is there some sort of time altering parallel that I don’t know about? I have heard the phrase “in a New York minute” which I guess means quickly. But does a New York minute have less than 60 seconds? What is it faster than say a Colorado minute? They doing things on the metric scale in the northeast now? And while in Mexico you where hear the Mayan’s say that something will take “five Mexican minutes”, implying that it will take some time. So if a New York minute is quick and five Mexican minutes is a lengthy bit of time, it would appear to be me that the farther north you go the faster things happen? So why is there six months of darkness in Alaska?

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