"GIVE it here, you wazzock! You've made a right pig's ear of it!"

After 33 years of marriage, I was enjoying a rare moment of triumph. Me and the missus were changing the duvet cover but someone had fitted the press-studs into the wrong holes. This would normally have sent me into a paddy but, for once, I wasn't the culprit.

This bedroom farce allowed me not only to blow my own trumpet but to harness the power of those old sayings that enrich everyday language.

I'd produced another old curiosity (no, not the missus) in the pub the previous night. One of our friends was clearly in some discomfort and began firtling with herself.

"What's up with you?" I asked.

"I've got an itch."

"Well, do what they do in China."

"Ay?" she said, looking at me gone-out. "What's that?"

"Scratch it, of course!"

That's when I heard the tumbleweed, for no-one else in the group had ever come across that saying, which I'd learned from my dad when I was knee-high to a grasshopper.

There were more blank faces when I dredged up two of my grandparents' sayings – "you dripping tin!" (for "silly person") and "I don't know whether I'm on this earth or Fuller's" ( "I'm very confused/not with it").

So I decided to ask friends and workmates for their favourite sayings – and I hope you'll tell me yours.

I'd expected lots of examples from popular culture, especially comedy programmes – Monty Python's "I see, I see, I get the picture", for example; Catherine Tate's "Am I bovvered?"; or Del Boy's "you plonker!"

But none of them figured. Instead, there were some I knew and understood but others I couldn't make head nor tail of – and most had been around for donkey's years.

"Night night, don't let the bed bugs bite" means, obviously, "have a good sleep" but don't ask me how a vision of creepy-crawlies under the covers is supposed to help.

"Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick" clearly means something's not very good but it could be worse, while "It's a bit black o'er Bill's mother's" signifies rain in the distance, though who Bill and his mum are and why their abode is thus cursed remains a mystery to me

"In heaven with the door shut" is one workmate's favourite, denoting someone blissfully enjoying themselves.

"What's the good of a well without a bucket?" is pretty straightforward and I'm assured that "sitting here like Piffin on a rock bun" suggests a feeling of uselessness, while "it'll pass in the dark with a light behind it" describes poor workmanship.

A Yorkshire friend was astonished when he first heard the Derbyshire saying "he's got a bag on" and recalls: "I thought it was a reference to some very basic form of condom." We locals, of course, know it means someone with a munk on.

There are still people in my part of the county who say of someone who's bandy-legged "he couldna stop a pig in an entry". "Scrating" (for crying) is one of those working-class words common to Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire but I'd never come across a phrase favoured by a friend from across the county border –"neither mickle nor muckle", meaning neither here nor there.

A colleague used to ask her mum what was in her shopping bag and was invariably told: "It's a whim-wham for a duck's bridle." The poor girl never knew what this meant but found herself saying it to her own children years later.

My survey elicited some clever sayings – "controlled urgency instead of panic", and "champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends".

Several people quoted "the pot calling the kettle black" and there's really no finer way to sum up someone accusing another of faults similar to their own. But did you know that it comes from the days when families had a copper kettle and an iron pot on the hearth? The kettle would be kept polished, while the iron pot remained black, so the kettle would reflect the pot and on seeing its reflection – seeing black – the pot could accuse the kettle of a fault it did not have.

"Foul as a hobbing iron" is another golden oldie but my all-time favourite, for oddity value more than anything else, is "he/she used to chew bread for our ducks". Trouble is, I've always used it when I'm supposed to know who someone is talking about but I haven't a clue. But a little research on the internet threw up another definition, alluding to a made-up friend, as in: "Ah yes, Tony Blair, knew him well, his mum used to chew bread for our ducks."

Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs!