Learning new idioms

As you might expect, Chinese has some idioms that English doesn't, so sometimes even if my friends are "speaking English" I really have no clue what they're saying and it takes some explanation.

Example #1)

me:  "Hey, who is that girl that J. is with?"

Caston:  "I don't know."  *laughing*  "He's a flower flower boy."

me:  "...um... what?"

Caston:  "He's a flower flower boy."

me:  "I don't know what that means."

There was a great deal of back and forth (and Dan backing me up on the fact that we had no clue what this meant) before Caston sort of explained it... that he's a good looking guy who all the girls like, and so he's always with a girl, but it's always a different girl.

Turns out it's a Korean term.

However, the difficulties in idioms are not always so easily resolved.

Example #2)

My friend Simon was telling me how he doesn't look like his siblings and is also a good bit younger as we were walking through the mall one day.

Simon:  "I was a pig in the dustbin."

me:  *confused*

Simon:  "Do you know what that means?"

me:  *picturing pigs-in-a-blanket*  *deciding that this is maybe an idiom for a surprise baby?*  "No...."

Simon:  "Pig in a dustbin.... hmm... it means that maybe I wasn't really from that family, just they found me somewhere.  But it's just a joke, not really."

me:  "Oh, okay."

And so I accepted this pig-in-a-dustbin idiom.

Only to realize several weeks later, when he was trying to explain this to my mom, that he hadn't said pig in a dustbin, or pig anything at all.  He said picked up in a dustbin.

...facepalm.