[Ads-l] "hard as Chinese arithmetic": HDAS 1977, antedating

[Wilson Gray]

The old man and lesser mortals - Page 135
https://books.google.com/books?id=E78eAAAAMAAJ
Larry L. King - 1974 - ‎Snippet view
... companion in Odessa (except for his affectionate new wife, Ann) is
Norman Childress, a used-car salesman and free spirit given to such shotgun
observations as "Just dancin' with that ole girl made my dingus _hard as
Chinese arithmetic_.

In my experience, this dates back to at least 1949." Some others of this
type from that era are:

harder than a molunk chunk
hard as times was in '32
so hard, a cat couldn't scratch it
so hard, it could scratch diamond

In 1961, I heard from a fellow St. Louisan attached to my unit on
T[emporary]D[ut]Y,

". . . so hard, I didn't have enough skin left to close my eyes"
-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org