Filling shoes and/or boots
Emptying a boot is a different matter entirely.
Archive for Idioms
same shoe
Just saw someone on a BoardGameGeek forum use the phrase “I am in the same shoe with you,” which I don’t recall ever encountering before. I like it—it was immediately clear what it means—but now I’m curious about it. A Google search for [“same shoe with you”] shows only about 13,000 instances of that phrase […]
Malaphors
In response to a Facebook post of mine in 2017, a friend introduced me to the word malaphor, which refers to a phrase that mixes two (or more) idioms. My post used the phrase “The devil’s hands make light work.” A couple of other examples that friends gave in comments: The road to hell wasn’t […]
as who should say
Reading a Thurber essay about Henry James, I came across this phrase: James’s Renunciation Scene is managed, as who should say, rather more exquisitely than Hammett’s I hadn’t encountered the phrase as who should say before, so I mentally marked it to look up later, and I kept reading. On the next page, Thurber writes: […]
on the back foot
The idiom is from cricket, but I would think it would also apply to soccer/football and baseball, and maybe hockey?
Opinions
Just happened across this recombinant idiom, apparently written by Roland Bruno on Board Game Geek: Opinions are like wishes. You can lead them to water but you can’t teach them new tricks. (See also a previous post in which I learned that phrases like these are also known as dundrearyisms.)
in the tank
The word 'tank' has a surprising variety of slang meanings, actually.
One is not like Single
Give these idioms a big hand!
Boots up!
The OED didn't help, although I was surprised to learn that 'booty' (as in pirate) was probably not derived from 'boot' meaning profit (as in the phrase 'to boot'), at least not directly.
Turn that smile upside-down
I don't know if the difference between the British and American frowns comes in to play, here, but I suppose it might.