At one point, I used the expression, “Beard the lion in its den” in front of The Doktah and Bitter Guy. They accused me of making it up. “No!” I said. “That’s a real expression!”

“Oh, come on,” they said. “You bearded the lion in its den? You expect us to believe that means something?”

“Look it up!” I told them. So they did. It turns out that the Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines the transitive verb “to beard” as:

¹to confront and oppose with boldness, resolution, and often effrontery
or
²to furnish with a beard.

Needless to say, there was much merriment made of definition two, and we immediately instituted the policy of using “noun me” to mean “furnish me with a noun.”

Also needless to say is that there was much gloating done by me about the existence of the phrase, “beard the lion in its den.” Granted, I am used to people my age questioning the legitimacy of certain phrases that are a part of my vocabulary. Because apparently, I have the slang vocabulary of an eighty-year-old woman. I have been known to say, without irony, “dang,” “cripes,” “new digs [in reference to an apartment],” and “criminey.”

But the crowning glory is my use of the phrase, “Now we’re cooking with gas!”

Seriously, that’s a real expression. I didn’t make that up.