That Nose Has Sailed

I should have been updating my collection of odd quotations and malapropisms. Here are a few:

  • Today, Katie wrote to me and quoted her conversation with Peter: “That train has sailed, I’m afraid,” she told him.
  • This from Cheryl a couple years ago: “You don’t want to bite your nose to spite your face.”
  • I have a couple quotations from Molly when she was an irritable teenager. While we were stopped at a red light, she impatiently demanded, “Why are we going so slowly?” And in the summer of 2007, upon waking while camped out on the river, she wondered crankily, “How did this dew get all over everything?”
  • More than once, Mom has said, “She had a double-cow cat-fit.”
  • Once I drove up to a hotel we were staying at and said, “Ooooh, goody! They have a golf course! Oh, wait. I hate golf.”
  • An e-mail from Syd: “The flight from Sydney was smooth sailing.”
  • I don’t recall from whence I gathered this: “It was salad years.”
  • From an Internet chat: “This may, however, be a mute point.”
  • And one that Molly reminded me of a few days ago: Her school principal wrote, “The children sang in dulcimer tones.”

That’s all I can find for right now.

5 comments

  1. What should the “double-cow cat-fit” really be? I’ve been having a gay old time swapping words and letters around to figure that one out!

  2. “Double-cow cat-fit” is simply a Mom-ism. I don’t remember if my grandmother also said it. If someone’s having a double-cow cat-fit, they’re seriously upset.

  3. I was never an irritable teenager; I don’t know what you mean.

    Quite a few of these are transportation-themed. All trains must sail, it’s true.

  4. reminds me of our kid toby and what we used to call tobilish. as a toddler, instead of “really?”, he would say: in the whole life?
    we still use that today.

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