Sayings that you never understood or misinterpreted growing

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"Handsome is as handsome does."

Wtf does THAT mean?
I heard one of my eighth grade teachers say that, and I still cant decifer it.

She was a lady responding to girls in the class. So the male equivalent would be "beauty is as beauty does" I suppose. But it still doesnt make any sense.

I often think about the word "art".

It gets tossed around so many times people think only great people can be artists.
Truth is all you have to do is express yourself in any of the 5 senses.

"Work of art" : the same as normal art, but it wasn't as easy to make, so they had to 'work' at it.
"State of the art" : art is random, some people emulate their favourite artists, others try to be original, so therefore the 'state' is relative to anyone. There is no one state of the art, as there are many peices.
"Life imitate art" (Vice Versa) : We are influenced by everything we sense, and not all of it is art, we also express ourselves (our lives) by creating art. It just goes in an infinite loop.

I still don't get "slow and steady wins the race."
Umm, not if it's a hundred yard dash it doesn't.

'Taken a turn for the worse', so have they never taken a turn in their life prior to this or did they step in some unfortunate liquid which made the turn worse and actually become a threat to their life, or did something barge into their head and whack them off course, if so, please state exactly what the invading object is or slippery substance is, I know it wasn't quicksand or glue as if they tried turning whilst covered in this they will not have made a turn at all but simply snapped their legs off or submerged without a pirouette down to doom being performed... Also, if they were able to make this mysterious Turn, how come they could not complete a U-turn, it's only slightly further to spin isn't it? Which way do those who take a turn for the worse turn, maybe we can figure out a direction to avoid becoming another inflexible victim to this ghastly phrase

"They didn't have none" and any other sentences with double negatives. If they didn't have none, then they had some because it wasn't none, and the opposite of none is some. I understand it, but it annoys me.

"It's a real pea-souper." I don't know what it has to do with fog, and fog doesn't look like pea soup, which I've never seen, but can imagine.

"As happy as Larry." Who is Larry, and why is he happy?

Some old sayings contradict each other. Like "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and "out of sight, out of mind". It's weird and dumb.

I prefer the first saying though. Because the less I see a lot of people, the more I like them.

Actually, raining cats and dogs does have a literal interpretation. In antiquity, when it rained the gutters overflowed, and the bodies of animals were washed up in the streets.

One saying I think seems very negative is "killing two birds with one stone." The meaning is to solve two problems or meet two objectives using a single strategy. Such a negative idiom for an ultimately positive outcome.

"Hope against hope"-meaningless repetition. "Hope against the odds," or "Hope against logic" seems more sensible.

"Have your cake and eat it too" is actually backward. The real saying is "Eat your cake and have it too," meaning you can't waste your resources and hope they will be there in the future. "Have your cake and eat it too," presumably means having it both ways, but it is a nonsense expression.

I just read an article in the most recent Reader's Digest about idioms that are flawed and stupid and why they are fallacies. It was concise and interesting.

"Glued to the TV".

I first saw it in a newspaper around the time of Princess Diana's funeral and thought it literally meant being stuck to the TV with glue

Any of those "X is the new Y" type sayings (e.g. "50 is the new 30"). Stupid and wrong! Your age is what it is-make the best of your life now.