When writing about idioms last week, I ran out of space before I ran out of content.

I remember a time when not knowing an idiom became an embarrassment. I was working for a gardening organization, and someone came up with a bumper sticker that read, "Weed'em and Reep!"

Most of us giggled and loved it. But one fellah, otherwise pretty bright, looked confused.

"I don't see what's funny," sez he.

I pondered for a while, then asked him if he played cards. No, came the answer, and he admitted that he had never heard, "Read 'em and weep," the idiom that inspired our bumper sticker.

Non sequiturs can become idioms. A Spaniard will say, "I have an aunt who plays the guitar" when he wants to point out that the topic has nothing to do with the price of tea in China.

My Brooklyn friends quote a real fellow with such little claim to fame that he would say, "So what? I know Rocky Graziano," when nonplussed.

That's probably how such expressions get started. You begin repeating a line that amused you, and poof"¦ an idiom is born. As my date and I passed a man at the race track, he said to his companion, in very heavy Brooklynese, "Didya hear dat Louie, de bum, is in da hospital?"

I'm afraid that we mimicked this bit of information for years, creating our own idiom.

Those of you much older than I might remember Jane Ace of early radio. Jane was always fracturing idioms and adages in her nasal, whining voice. My family had its own Jane Ace, but I wasn't bright enough to write them all down.

"I don't blame him for leaving her. She was a milestone around his neck" was one I do recall. Another was, "There he was, dead as a doorknob."

She would get angry if we laughed, so we would have to avoid eye contact with each other to keep a straight face whenever she dropped one.

Families create idioms, often quoting a child. A toddling nephew invented a place where all lost things went.

"It's in the Bubitz," he'd say, and of course, we all adopted it as the final resting place of our own misplaced articles.

In Italy, an ailing car is said to "go by hiccups." When I was learning to drive, all cars bounced that way.