sayings and witticisms, adages & cliches, personal jokes & expressions, and drinking cheers.

i want to know your favorite folk, friend, or family sayings. like 'a watched pot never boils' and less obvious things. here are some of mine.
tell me yours! please please please

"even a stomped clock is right twice a day." (courtesy of the hougan family)
"if we had ham we could have ham and eggs if we had eggs" (papa dobkin and sam hood) said in response to someone going 'if only i had blank i could do blank'.
"the more you learn, the more you know, the more you know the more you forget, the more you forget, the less you know, so why bother learning anything atall?" (grandpa "pop" bill, on the subject of studying)
"it doesn't take a brain surgeon to be a brain surgeon" (papa dobkin), meaning just cuz you went to school for something smart, doesn't mean you aren't an idiot. ironic, i think, coming from a molecular biologist, don't you?
"F.P.H.B." (this is our family acronym that means Family Please Hold Back. the context is that if we have company over for dinner and might not have enough food for everyone, we say fphb).
"what's green hangs on a wall and shakes!". in response to an absurd assertion, an allusion to a family joke which goes as follows:
"-what's green, hangs on a wall, and shakes?
-what?
-a herring.
-a herring?
-yeah.
-why's it green?
-ya paint it green.
-why does it hang on a wall?
-ya hang it on a wall.
-why does it shake?
-ya shake it."

my dad also always says to me and my sister "use a fork", meaning let's just deal with the simple things first. This is b/c when we were kids me and my sister were eating dinner and rambling to my dad one night about how we had this school assembly and our teachers had told us we needed to come up with a family password to avoid being kidnapped, like a security question to use with strangers. we were rambling on and on about it and asked him what our family password should be, and my dad looked at us for a moment, and then said "use a fork". cuz i guess we had been eating with our hands during the conversation. that became our security password when we were kids and, more recently, my dad's way of saying let's be practical.

and instead of saying i love you, i miss you, or i'm thinking of you fondly, kev and i say "cak cak cak" but i forget how that came about. ima ask him when he gets home.

i also wanna know your favorite cheers like this old guy used to come into a bar my friend worked at and say "here's to swimmin' with long legged women" every time he did a shot.
isn't language a beautiful thing?