Busted

Kari Byron
One obscenely hot woman

If you haven't watched the show Mythbusters on the Discovery Chanel, I don't know what to tell you. You should probably go do that.
On Mythbusters, a group of relatively unattractive men and one obscenely hot woman take myths and urban legends* and tests them out to see which are true and which aren't. 
Sometimes, they test out popular expressions and cliches. Here are some of my favorites:

• Like a bull in a china shop: turns out hoofed creatures have amazingly versatile legs that allow them to maneuver more precisely than mere humans. When the Mythbusters dragged a bunch of shelves and filled them with china from a thrift store, they found that a bull tiptoed delicately about, careful to break nothing. This expression, according to World Wide Words, has been around at least since the early 1800s. Also according to this site, many, many languages have a similar idiom, except that most refer to an elephant, rather than a bull. Although, a boy elephant is called a bull, so perhaps the expressions aren't different after all.
• You can't polish a turd: The Mythbusters used dorodango, the ancient Japanese art of polishing balls of dirt and water, and successfully polished some dried turds. Doro in Japanese means mud, and dango refers to a rice dumpling.
  

  

  This is not poop. But it is an example
  of dorodango, and pretty damn cool.

  
  
• Cold feet: The Mythbusters showed that our feet actually may become cold when we're afraid. This has to do with the fact that your body, when it goes into its fight-or-flight response, gives up on non-essential tasks, like keeping your feet warm. That may be a bit of an over simplification, but I can tell you that one condition caused in part by cold feet is called chilblains. Chilblains comes from the words chill, meaning cold (obviously) and blain, meaning swelling.
• Beer goggles: This expression, which dates from the 1990s, refers to the condition of having had so much to drink that Conan O'Brien starts to look like Kari Byron. The Mythbusters found that some people do start to find people more attractive the more they drink. 
• That'll go over like a lead balloon: The Mythbusters created a balloon out of lead foil, and sure enough, it floated. A related expression, "that'll go over like a lead zeppelin," may have given rise to Led Zeppelin's band name, as we learned in this post.