“He’s as heavy as lead!”
Last night’s video: Family History and Stories of Opal Corn Myers 5.
Tipper
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Iv heard all of the above . Another one is That’s as dull as watching paint dry !!
I feel like I have been rode hard and put up wet. This saying pertains to horses. One
has to brush down a lathered horse after they have been ridden hard. A horse not
brushed down looks pretty rough.
I have heard “heavy as lead” from my mother’s family. More frequently, it was “fat as butter “.
Heavy as lead is used quite often here at home from referring to a baby to buying packs of water with about thirty to forty bottles in the package sitting on a bottom shelf in the store. I can sit here and think of many more ways we use it also. Thanks for sharing and have a great day everyone!
When I worked in the nursery at church I often asked mothers to stop feeding lead to their babies. We had one boy that was so heavy the ladies would lay him in the floor to change a diaper. He’s now over six feet tall and probably near 250 lbs.
I enjoy similes and similar fun phrasing–as slick as mud, ugly as sin, mad as a hornet, nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, plain as a mud fence, stiff as a board, wet as a drowned rat, soft as a kitten, phony as a three-dollar bill. Similes are humorous, descriptive, and endless if we use our imaginations and creativity in both speech and writing. Take picturesque sayings, for example. Can you think of anyone more at a disadvantage than that one-armed paperhanger? I nominate a one-legged man at a butt kicking.
I heard “ugly as a mud fence”.
Gene, I have heard and used everyone of the phrases you mentioned. I don’t guess this is a phrase but I recently read about a man being so ugly he had to rub a pork chop on his pants leg before his dog would even be seen with him. Concerning the nervous cat, my Daddy liked to say “nervous as a cat on a tin roof looking for a sand pile .”
Many of you know about how I struggle with depression after my wife’s death. Now many things brings back memories of her. Today’s post makes me think of a time not long after we were married. For many years I reloaded my shotgun shells. Not too long after we married, I was in a sporting goods store buying some supplies, one being a 25 lb bag of lead shot. The cloth bag this was in was not much larger than a 5 lb bag of sugar. Before I could stop her, she had pulled it off the counter, it almost stood her up on her head. At that time, she would not have weighed more than a hundred pounds with rocks in her pockets. It embarrassed her. Memories such as this sure are painful for me. We wrote about pretend games a few days ago, I now pretend to be living when in all honesty, I am just alive.
Memories of my deceased wife and our many adventures are what are what keeps me afloat these days. In my memories I find peace and joy. No sorrow there! I pray that you might soon be able to see life, love, and loss the way I do!
Ed, I know that is what my wife would want me to do. I am glad to have had 49 years of good memories with her but I guess I am different when it comes to memories, even though they are good memories they hurt me. Maybe it’s because I realize there will be not be anymore. I don’t have an answer. 49 years – 47 years marriage and 2 years of dating or going together.
I’ve heard that used referencing a baby. He looks like the run of the mill baby but when you pick him up you are surprised by his weight. “What you benna feedin that youngun, he’s as heavy as lead!”
We talkin Ira or Woody or both?
Ed-it was Ira 🙂
I thought so!
back in ’90’s I did home interior sewing as a side job. curtain weights were small disc’s. they help bottom corner’s in place so they hung straight.
He’s dummerana (“dumber than a;” sorry, spelling-challenged sometimes) box of rocks. I can relate… sometimes.
Very familiar with that comparison of anything being judged “heavy” is compared to lead. The ! exclamation mark sets the stage. It is a reaction of surprise, expecting one thing but finding another. On a quite different subject, (I probably shouldn’t tell you, Tipper) we have daffodils blooming here near Gainesville, GA. I’m leaning toward thinking an early spring but I have also seen warnings of a “polar vortex” coming around Valentine’s Day. Still, there are some spring cool season things I need to plant because they barely have time to become usable before they get hit with 80°F daytime highs.
I have heard all my life that if someone drives fast he has a lead foot! Another is when someone has worked hard all day and they are tired they say, My legs feel like lead.
I love sayings like that and the less common the better! I had a friend who used to say “They didn’t know me from Adam’s off cow”. I had to look up what an off cow was. My favorite though is when my Aunt Eldean says, “I’m getting as fat as a town dog”! I wish I could remember all the unique country sayings my parents and grandparents had!
I have heard of Adam’s off ox, but a cow would qualify just as well.
I’ve heard of “Adams off ox” but not his cow. The off ox term comes from when people used two oxen in a yoke. The driver could control the one nearest him. He couldn’t reach the other one so the other ox had allow itself to be controlled by the movements of the near ox. Sometimes that didn’t work out well.
Usually it was bulls that were used as oxen but cows could be trained to work too if they were big enough. So, “Adams off cow” is beginning to make sense now too.
Have you picked up that baby boy lately? He may be as tiny as a mouse, but he weighs a ton!
I had a little dog that did not like getting a bath. When you would pick her up to put her in the tub she’d go limp and she felt heavy as lead. lol
I’ve definitely heard that one!
Back in my younger years, I worked for a printing company that had a Linotype machine. We smelted lead into bars to feed it and this saying hold true. For such a small bar, those things were very heavy.
My Pa was a lin-0-type operator for a very long time. I don’t know when he started but he retired in 1959. He started working as a printer’s devil while he was in the Baptist Orphanage at Thomasville. He was a member of the ITU for about 50years.
I well remember those pigs that had to be hung on the feed chains. I also remember how hot the slugs were coming off the machine.