Any time you hear or remember a good idiom then post it here. I’m a collector. The only rule is you can just google a list of idioms. It has to come to you in natural course.
Anything like:
May your head grow like an onion
I’m gonna clean your clock
Blow your own trumpet
Etc.
One that I feel like I never hear but got from my mom is “raised in a barn”. If you ask someone if they were raised in a barn, you are accusing them of leaving doors open all the time.
Oh funny! In my family it meant you had bad manners more broadly. Leaving cupboards open or leaving messes also got. Also perhaps it’s regional be we said born in a barn
I’m a big fan of the fact that Great minds think alike is the English version of what we in Germany mean, when we say Two idiots, one thought
A dichotomy that lays bare the soul of two peoples who did indeed have the same thought and chose to express it… differently.
That’s so good. It is so much more true that it’s idiots who think alike. Kane it to America to invert what is idiotic and claim it great. Germany has some really good ones of which I only know a few and most of those are actually Yiddish.
This excellent vid finds a potential idiom (“potential” bc I don’t know how common it is – neither does the video creator) that translates to “chew bread and x,” referring to how natural a task is for someone. “Those who chew bread and play shmups/I chew bread and play shmups” is the example given. I like it a lot and started using it myself. So much more charming and succinct than saying something like “comes as naturally as breathing”
I’ve always enjoyed saying “we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it” far more than either of the respective idioms it came from.
One of my favourite idioms is “needs must when the devil drives”—synonymous with “nothing for it,” another idiom I like—meaning you have no choice about what must be done in a situation. I remembered vividly first encountering it through Things My Girlfriend and I have Argued About which is a website I’ve remembered to exist maybe twice since the 2000s including right now as I write this.
I remember it vividly because the author used the shortened “needs must” and I’d never encountered that construction before so I had to google it immediately before finishing whatever entry it can be found on. It’s also just like such good imagery? It’s apparently in its modern form and has been in use as far back as 1420.
Not my circus not my monkeys.
Ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag
As an American I sometimes like to drop “and Bob’s your uncle” in when you least expect it
related, sometimes I’ll say “done and dusted” which I picked up from an Australian peloton lady
Saying you need something “like a hole in the head” is very funny to me. Such a wild thing to say lol
Idioms 
German Edition Part II
Another one that came to mind after my first post is a great one to use when you’re very angry and/or disgusted, especially ethically. I can’t possibly eat as much as I’d like to puke. (Ich kann gar nicht so viel essen, wie ich kotzen möchte.)
Given its origin I use it almost exclusively in a political context.[1]
We say: That’s not my beer. I like the monkeys though; Creates quite a vivid image in my head.
Coined by Jewish painter Max Liebermann in reaction to witnessing the Nazi’s takeover of power in 1933. ↩︎
I’ve started to use gooning to refer to spending a lot of time on one thing, especially because my one friend hates it and always replies with “That’s not what gooning means.” To which I say, “Oh, I didn’t realize we had a gooning expert in the house!”
My partner and I, after ADHD hyperfocusing on our projects over the weekend and burning out, started to say we gooned too close to the sun. I’m afraid I never mentally matured passed 13.
I once put together a list of bad/incorrect idioms for D&D that I used for a particular NPC to mess with my players. Here are a few of my favs:
Get two birds stoned
It’s water under the fridge
It’s not rocket appliance
Gotta learn things through denial and error
Hit em with everything we caught
Keep your friend’s toast and your enemies toaster
I can swallow my prize
On a scale from one or ten
I love these
Oh yeah this country is great at vulgar idioms and that’s a good one.
