Alec Russell, writing about GWB, Condi, etc. in this morning’s Daily

Telegraph: “In Texas there is a saying that someone is ‘more nervous than a

long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs’.”

Is there really such a saying? When I read this kind of thing, I always

suspect the writer just made it up and stuck it on the Texans, or whoever

was appropriate to the case. Same with Nikita Khrushchov’s pithy little

folkisms. One of them, I dimly recall, in his face to face with Richard

Nixon, was: “In my country we have a saying: ‘First catch your bedbug, then

pour boiling water in his ear.’” Again, is this really a thing that

Russians (or Ukrainians?) go around saying to each other?

On Long Island we have a saying: “Never trust a generic attribution from a

journalist looking to fill a couple of lines of copy with something

colorful.”