Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, July 11, 1993                   TAG: 9307110028
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Lon Wagner
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

OK, WE'LL ASK: HOW HOT IS IT?

But it's hot as hell. That is the obvious heat comparison, and it's boring. But you'll be glad to know the creativity and folksiness of the English language is not dead - it's just a bit unprintable.

I'll try to shoehorn some of the hell/Hades/devil comparisons past the copy editors. After all, those things are mentioned in the Bible!

I've been soliciting "It's as hot as . . ." statements from people for three days, and here are a some of the better ones:

It's so hot the devil's at the mall giving out discount tickets to hell because it's cooler there. Shows what a jerk the devil is - the guy gives out discount tickets instead of free passes.

It's hot as the hinges of hell. That one was passed along by Ginny Lee Williams, a Rocky Mount woman who remembers former town Mayor Elliott Perdue saying it.

Another popular way to convey extreme heat or cold is to compare it to the temperature of certain anatomical parts of snakes, bugs, mice, brass monkeys and witches.

Rural folks are really good at coming up with these things, which seems logical since they tend to run across snakes and other vermin more often than city dwellers do.

Though Boston, New York and other Northern cities have nearly cornered the market on rats, I haven't heard a wonderfully folksy saying from any Bostonians about how hot the rats' butts were.

Here are a few phrases I've run across in the animal category:

It's so hot the cows are giving curdled milk.

It's hotter than a snake's butt in a wagon rut. That's a good one because it rhymes, but some newsroom people couldn't figure it out until we decided the snake would be sweating because it is about to be run over by a wagon.

Early in the research, I thought the folksy heat comparison was a dying art, since older people seemed to be able to spit them out quickly, and younger people didn't know them.

But a twentysomething Franklin County guy - who grew up in Lee County - saved his generation by coming up with almost 20 of the sayings within minutes. People in real Southwest Virginia - by that, I mean the counties more than two hours south and west of Roanoke - love these sayings. A couple years ago I asked a young Scott Countian how things were going and he responded: "If I was any happier, I'd be twins."

Anyway, my source in Franklin County didn't want his name used - "I don't want people thinking I'm a redneck" - but here are a few of his sayings:

It's hotter than a well-digger's butt in the Mojave Desert.

It's hotter than a chrome tailpipe on a Harley-Davidson.

It's hotter than a two-dollar pistol.

It's so hot I've been drinking Texas Pete to stay cool.

And finally, my own phrase. The only one I could think of after three days. A truly lame, suburban phrase:

"It's hotter than a Krispy Kreme doughnut when the HOT FRESH NOW sign is on."

\ Lon Wagner covers Franklin County, where it's hotter than . . . well, you get the idea.