Five stupid sayings (part 6)

The English language has many cool sayings, but it also has quite a few silly sayings. This week the Charles Fudgemuffin blog takes a look at five more of those stupid sayings.

Donuts may be dumb, but they're also delicious!

1) As dumb as a day old donut

This was a saying that I first heard while watching Prison Break.

The obvious thought that comes to mind is why the need to specify that the donut is a day old? Is a fresh donut any more intelligent than a day old donut?

I'm pretty sure the donut was pretty dumb to begin with, even before it became a day old. If you were to conduct an IQ test on donuts of various ages, I'm pretty sure the relative intelligence levels would come out as equally stupid.

To be fair, I don't think I've heard anyone else say it, so perhaps it's just the character on Prison Break who was as dumb as a day old donut.

"Fire!"

2) Hang fire

Hang fire means hold on for now, but if you take it literally why would 'hanging fire' mean 'hold on'?

The whole concept of hanging fire is totally bizarre. You can't hang fire. Not without setting fire to whatever you hang it to.

3) Split up

The Scooby-Doo team about to split up.

"Okay. We're four humans, so us three humans will look over
here, while you look over there on your own with the dog!"

At first glance this expression seems perfectly normal, especially to viewers of Scooby Doo. If you want break your party into smaller groups, you split up. However, although 'split' makes sense, why 'up'?

If a flock of birds decided to split up, then that would make sense, because birds can fly in an upwards direction. But given that humans can't fly, why do we say 'let's split up'? Where does the 'up' come from?

Surely the expression should be 'split sideways while remaining at ground level'. Admittedly that wouldn't be quite as catchy, but it would be more technically accurate.

Another 'hard day' on the sun lounger.

4) Working like a dog

Some dogs can be full of energy, especially puppies, but most adult dogs spend the majority of their time lying around.

So why do we say 'working like a dog'? Does that mean we've been lying around all day?

5) Dig yourself out of a hole.

Not all dogs lie around all day.
Some dogs dig themselves into holes, like this one.

Finally, to quote the logic of Sam Gardner from Atypical, "The idea of digging yourself out of a hole is ridiculous. The more your dig, the deeper you get."

He's right!

You can't argue with logic like that. You can dig yourself into a hole, as the dog in the photo proves, but you can't dig yourself out of a hole.

The English language contains many silly sayings, so I'll probably feature some more in a future blog post. However, for all those without any patience, you can find more stupid sayings in my previous blog posts:
Five stupid sayings (part 3)
Five stupid sayings (part 4)
Five stupid sayings (part 5)