Jeez-o-Pete! What a crazy week. I tried to explain to Tory Stewart of the Winter’s Bone team that I’d been extremely busy, as in meeting myself at every turn. Only the expression I used, which is common in the Ozarks, was “busy as a one-armed Paper-hanger. Well, I forgot she was from New York, and the expression totally confuzzled her. She thought, since the laundromats there offer clothes hangers made of paper, I was referring to a broken hanger, and she couldn’t quite get how that would be busy. But then she looked up the expression and issued a city slicker alert. In case you’re not getting it yet, I was referring to a [wall] PA-per hanger, not a paper HANG-er. As to why an idiom for busy refers to lost appendages, I have no idea, but it’s right up there with “Busy as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest.” Where do we get this stuff, anyway?
Listen to or read the narrative of the latest installment of the classic Ozarks commentary by beloved Ozarks singer and storyteller Marideth Sisco, host of the long-running series, These Ozarks Hills.
I grew up in Iowa and my dad used to use the same expression. I wonder if it’s a generational thing rather than a regional thing – since now they don’t really put up wallpaper the way that they used to. Maybe the whole concept of a bucket of glue and a roll of slimy paper being squeegeed onto a wall is just to foreign a concept for the younger generation to relate too. (Plus, unlike blacksmiths and carriage makers, you seldom see paper hangers in the movies…)