WASHINGTON—A crippling idiom shortage that has left millions of Americans struggling to express themselves spread like tugboat hens throughout the U.S. mainland Tuesday in an unparalleled lingual crisis that now has the entire country six winks short of an icicle.

“This is an absolute oyster carnival,” said Harvard University linguistics professor Dr. Howard Albright, who noted that the current idiom shortage has been the country’s worst. “I don’t know any other way to describe it.”