Ok, here’s one I just heard that has a little connection to me, because a variation of it is one my dad and some of the men in his family used to say occasionally, and I’d never heard it once I left home, and now it just popped up on my TV.
The phrase is, “My arse is making buttons” - which means you’re very nervous.
Now, the rest of the story:
I was just watching Still Game, a Scottish comedy from probably 15 years or so ago, and at one point, just as a court case is starting, one character turns to the other and says, “Geez, I tell ya, my arse is making buttons!”
That struck me immediately, as the only time I’d ever heard anything near that was when I was a kid, and my dad and some of his relatives would say something similar, specifically, “My sphincter is cutting washers.” - same meaning, to denote nervousness, and no one in my dad’s family would ever say arse/azz, as that would have been considered quite vulgar, so they cleaned it up a bit, but it was still something that I only ever heard the men say, and never around a woman, so it still had some connotation to vulgarity, though more mild.
Hearing that took me right back to being a kid, sitting on the front porch of my great-grandparents’, on a visit to my dad’s family in Kentucky, and listening to the men trading stories…”Yessir, I’ll tell ya, I come down offa that hill, pullin’ that load o’ ‘bacca, an’ that ol’ horse got spooked somethin’ awful, an’ I liked to never got it under control. My sphincter was really cuttin’ washers, you better believe it!”
I excitedly googled the phrase I’d heard on TV, and it came back with that being a Scottish phrase, so
SatNavSaysStraightOn, as our resident Scot…is that a phrase you’re familiar with? If so, I love the way something like that makes it from there to here.
