Overheard in E&M

Professor: And by using this method, we see that there are two ways to skin a cat... (little cry of horror from back) What? What is it?
Student: (with thick German accent) Zat is so horrible!
Professor: Well, Student, it's a perfectly common English phrase.
Student: My goodness... and zey say us Germans are cruel!

[end scene]

I guess my point is here is language is a tricky thing, as I'm still discovering new words and phrases in the New Zealand lexicon that I seek clarification on. ("When you said 'biscuts' there you meant what my people call 'cookies,' right?") I'm always a little excited about this though- I love adding new layers onto language as doing so gives you all the more delicious words to choose from.

Plus we need others to remind us how weird some of the things we say are anyway. Who was the guy in history who was so proficient at cat skinning that he started talking about the ways to do it relative to his daily life? And who were his friends that they caught on and started using it themselves, and the friends of the friends, and the friends of those friends...?