For all intensive purposes

I have to admit, I just about fell out of a tree the first time I saw that expression. It is, of course, a perversion of "for all intents and purposes." I have been thinking this morning about some of the funny expresssions we use in English, and a few that might be particular to my family and posse. Not surprisingly, a few that spring to mind have to do with the cold: It's colder than a whore's heart, for example, or colder than a witch's tit. If it's extremely cold outside, it could well freeze the balls off a brass monkey. Speaking of animal expressions, if something sounds very mournful or just really bad, we say it sounds "like a dying calf in a hailstorm."

And some others that I haven't heard a whole lot outside my own family: If my mother was having a particularly bad hair day she'd exclaim that she looked like "the wreck of the Hesperus." (Which is Longfellow poem about a shipwreck.) If my father thought that someone was really stupid, he'd say that he or she "didn't know if their ass was bored or punched."

And from way back when, when I was still wearing a beard, a girlfriend's family would sometimes have a callyption fit, which always gave me a mental image of a group of steel drummers running around in a tizzy. Crazy as a bag of hammers they were.