I have a friend from Mississippi and I've heard him use this expression sometimes: slicker than snot on a doorknob. What exactly does it mean? (I guess it's something positive but I'm not too sure myself.)
Learn English – What does “slicker than snot on a doorknob” mean
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sb. is used as abbreviation for substantive, which grammarians use as a basic term form for noun. This is an old practice from the Latin days. n is used to denote proper nouns in such cases.
For example, in "What does “pull sb. out of the hat” mean?", sb. is used as a placeholder for a noun.
This page (which is the first hit reported by a Google search on >maze bright<) makes clear that the phrase means approximately ‘capable of figuring by yourself out what you need to know and do in a new job, without formal training’:
Unless everyone is 100% Maze-Bright walking in the door and will come up-to-speed quickly on all the intricacies of stakeholder requirements, products and services, processes, organizational and job roles and responsibilities, and strategic changes needed, etc. – you might consider providing some guidance.
The author (a training consultant who has been in the field since the end of the 1970s) says he “first heard of the quality of being “maze-bright” in the early 1980s. It was an incoming requirement in most of the big Fortune 500-type organizations that I worked in.” I think it very likely that you are correct in deriving the phrase from psychological tests measuring rats' ability to find food in a maze. The earliest use of the phrase I have found is a study by W.T. Heron and B.F. Skinner, "“The rate of extinction in maze-bright and maze-dull rats”, Psychological Record, 1940, 4, 11-18.
Best Answer
Doorknobs, generally being made of smooth materials such as brass or glass, are somewhat slippery. Snot, also being made of smooth materials, is comparably slippery.
Combine the two and you have quite the traction-less situation.
This is a vivid metaphor known colloquially as a 'redneck expression', like colder than a witch's tit in a brass brassiere or hotter than two rats [redacted] in a wool sock.
For what it's worth, I have always heard it as
slicker than snot on a **glass** doorknob.