soaked to the skin/ soaked to the bone

[optimistic pessimist]

Dear all,
I have seen or heard the phrases "be soaked to the skin" and "be soaked to the bone" to mean someone is all wet. Which do you think is used more often? A friend of mine from Texas says she uses "bone" and has never heard the "skin" version, but on the Internet there are more matches of "skin" than "bone". I don't know if this is because of personal preference or regional difference, or other reasons.

Thank you!
OP

 

[Rover_KE]

In BE it's 'soaked to the skin' and 'chilled to the bone'.

 

[emsr2d2]

We also use "soaked through to the skin".

 

[Jill Dorchester]

I'm from Michigan, not Texas, and I've only ever heard "soaked [through] to the skin" and "chilled to the bone". Since the metaphor is designed to describe how hard it's raining outside, or a situation where a person wasn't expecting to get wet (he fell out of a boat, perhaps), it is presumed that the person was fully clothed. So to get soaked through to the skin means that the circumstances completely saturated his various layers clothing and actually soaked his flesh. (Of course, Texans have a habit of exaggerating everything.....y'know, because everything is Bigger, Badder and Better in Texas... so perhaps they say "soaked to the bone" there because they get wetter than the rest of us when it rains. ;-) )