Horseshoes and Hand Grenades... and Other Odd Sayings

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Back when I was growing up, "horseshoes and hand grenades" was a saying that was used to signal someone coming up short and saying they had been close. The response was "Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades." These days, nobody uses that saying anymore, at least that I've heard. Instead, we give out participation ribbons for everyone.

With nothing really on my mind to post, other than that saying, I typed it into an A. I. image creator and above was one of four results it spit out at me, none of them really having a horseshoe in them. So perhaps horseshoes are still a bit fuzzy for A.I., especially when referring to the recreational game of horseshoes. The other three pictures options presented a person with a cowboy hat on their head.

"Slicker than a bean" was another expression that came to mind but in that case, google couldn't provide with any help on determining its origins or meaning. I can still remember how I came to use this phrase. Years ago in high school shop, I built a small(ish) outbuilding for our farm as my class project. It was big enough to hold three sow farrowing crates and act as sort of an overflow during the cold winter months should we have more than 10 farrow at the same time which is what our standard farrowing room held. As it was being delivered on a flatbed truck, the operator kept saying it should come off "slicker than a bean" but when it did, it ended up halfway off before it got jammed up and caused the two middle skid beams I had built it upon (to allow us to drag it into place) to snap in half and buckle violently upward into the enclosed room. Fortunately the damage ended up being minor once we got it completely off the truck, setting on flat ground and slid into place. But after that day, we used the phrase "slicker than a bean" to indicate some sort of process we hoped would go easy but might fail spectacularly if it went wrong. Below is what the A.I. Image Creator came up with for the saying.

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Racking my brain for another old sayings we used on the farm, the last one I will tell you about is a bit vulgar so stop reading now, it you are easily offended. The saying was "piss up a rope" which according to google, is a phrase used to tell someone to go do something futile to do. Most people probably add the work "Go" on front and use it as a phrase to tell someone to leave in a rude manner. We however never used it in either context. For us, it was usually a phrase indicating we had failed at something we were trying to do. Sometimes that task may have been futile but perhaps sometimes we eventually succeeded. I typed it as well into Image Creator but was a bit worried about how the results were going to be. I needn't be worried because all the results were very PG rated and all focused on the rope part of the saying as well as a rainbow of colors for some odd reason. I selected the best of the four images from my perspective and attached it below.

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