You Brought a Knife to a Gun Fight

Welcome to Cliche Thursday, where we occasionally deconstruct 5 expressions that we’ve all heard one too many times.

Here we go…

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” – or a fog machine. Or smoldering embers from a youth group campfire. Or a kid burning a leaf with a magnifying glass before burning an ant with a magnifying glass. Or a stick of patchouli incense. Or a bunch of seventh graders with marlboro lights trying to find their identity in rebellion. Or clothes and hair that are going to smell like smoke until you wash them.

Or coughing. Where there’s smoke, there’s always coughing.

“You brought a knife to a gun fight” – Three things here:

1. I don’t have to worry about this one because I don’t own a knife. At least not a fighting knife. I own butter knives and serrated steak knives, but I’d sooner show up to a fight with a trident than with one of those.

2. If I catch wind of a gun fight happening, pretty safe bet I’m not gonna show up to it. In fact, there’s 3 places in this world where I can guarantee you I will never be on my own volition: A gun fight, an air show, and Nickelback’s green room.

3. Are we even sure that gunfights ever happened in the Old West? Were people that angry and dumb that they thought the best way to settle their differences was for the slowest gun shooter to die? Seems like the second dumbest way to settle an argument in the history of the world. (Number One, of course, is going on Judge Judy.)

“To be honest with you” – …whatever statement I said before this one wasn’t true. In fact, every exchange we’ve had prior to this has been drenched in lies and untruths.

But hey, good news! You can absolutely trust this next statement because I’ve qualified it. Just know that once I hit a period and start a new sentence, all bets are off.

“Don’t bite the hand that feeds you” – Especially if you’re just sitting on the couch eating Doritos.

“We were piss poor” – It was probably the worst of my father’s crazy ideas. His hunch that some day urine would be accepted by merchants throughout the world never came to fruition.

Had it ever been accepted as a viable form of currency things would have been totally different for us. We would have been piss-rich. But as it was we just had a basement full of pee.

What About You? If an expression is really chapping your lips lately, flame it in the comments.

(for past editions of Cliche Thursday, click here.)