Stupid Idioms - with Ian Lang

What’s the stupidest idiom in the entire English language?

That was a question posed at Quora last week. Ian Lang, no stranger on this blog, has given me his blanket permission to use his writings here, contributed as follows:


Ian Lang, Leading Technician answered:

Oh, there’s lots of them. Down at the Idiomatic Phrase Testing Range (IPTR), we’re regularly trying these out.

No. 1 : What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger:

So we did an experiment. We got six large men and had them lift anvils.All of them could manage it. Then we shot two through the left knee, two through the right knee, and two through both knees. All six survived, but not one could succesfully lift an anvil any longer.

No. 2: It’s not rocket science:

We got a bunch of chemists working on solid propulsion systems and introduced them to a bunch of engineers working on rapid reaction guidance systems and told them to deploy a satellite by Friday teatime or they’d be next lifting anvils (see above). It appears it was indeed rocket science that happened thereafter.

No. 3: Time flies when you’re having fun:

We took a group of students from the local university and synchronised their watches to an atomic clock. The we got them totally pissed, fed them some marijuana, and played American soft rock at them for five hours. When we checked their watches, they were still in synchronisation. We didn’t make them lift any anvils. We feared that the work involved in lifting anvils might kill them and that would be a bit of a sticky wicket when explaining to their tutors.

No. 4: A picture is worth 1000 words:

We borrowed Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” from the Uffizi. We painted over it with white emulsion and wrote a very accurate description of what it used to look like in exactly one thousand words. Judging by the reaction when we sent it back, the picture was worth much. much more than a thousand words. Perhaps we ought to have used Italian words instead.

For some reason, the government is considering cutting the funding to IPTR. Personally, I blame Brexit.