Lessons from Teeth Pulling

Tomorrow is my last day of my 2-week dentistry elective. It's been quite instructive, and I'm thankful to the patient dentists and the dentists' patients. This morning, I extracted maybe 8 teeth from two different individuals. An excerpt from a conversation between Eric and Rachel earlier today:

"Wow, pulling teeth takes a lot of grip strength. I mean, it's tough. It's like... like..."

"Pulling teeth?"

"Right. Like pulling teeth."

This led to an interesting discussion about how life experiences shed light on the truth (or lack thereof) of various cultural expressions. We are thus categorizing them into 3 castes: true, false, and true with a caveat.

The True: as dead as the dodo (though it live in our hearts); as scarce as hen's teeth; as alike as two peas in a pod; as welcome as a skunk at a lawn party; easy as cherry picking.

The False: as dead as a doornail (since when did 'inanimate' mean 'dead'?); sick as a dog (explanation?); clear as mud; as quick as silver.

The True with Caveats: Easy as apple pie (only with the apple peeler/corer/slicer); solid as a rock (except the rock of Cappadocia, Turkey, see photo across top of blog); gentle as a lamb (ask me to tell you my PTSD lamb story from Scotland some time); as large as life (quite depends on a lot of things, don't you think?).

There are some other idioms we are looking into investigating. Perhaps we can invest in a menagerie for our backyard now that it is growing grass. We could try "proud as a peacock, " "busy as a beaver" or even "brave as a lion." It could be an interesting experiment with those three animals in the backyard. The neighbor's dogs no longer stand a fighting chance if they invade our yard again...