Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31872
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31872
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You do it as you did, they just need to be short and pithy enough that people get what they are; slang or shorthand for something ridiculous or over the top. I would read them out loud (in my studio alone, or to the dog), to see if they feel "sayable". The Flower Hill comment does, the Orion thing does not.

To become popular, sayings need to be short and memorizable quickly and easily by even the poor students. "Putting lipstick on a pig" is short, visual, and memorable. "Coyote ugly" is a memorable reference to a memorable joke. If you get too complex or the saying is hard to say in a single normal breath, they would not have ever gone viral, and you are trying to hard.

All such phrases are extreme exaggerations of some condition. People do not have to know the story you refer to (like who or what is Flower Hill), the context of usage tells them what the nature of the exaggeration is.

As for curses; believable curses are few syllables, not sentences, and can be used as sudden exclamations even at the very end of an exhalation. Even more so, these must be easy to say (not just for the fictional character, but for the reader in their mind). Curses occupy a different place in our brain than the rest of language (as evidenced by FMRI), new ones have to "fit" like existing curses to feel right, by "fit" I mean be able to be used in similar circumstances without straining to make it work. "Oh Boggle!" could be a curse, "Indubidilous!" takes too much work to say.

Original score: 4