More phrases of life

Thanks to some of my devoted readers, and some more excavations of my memory, I have some more lovely sayings of great mystery.

For example, a small space might be described as “no room to swing a cat”. Why a cat, and why the image of holding a cat by its tail and swinging it around your head. Who would do that? However, I think it might be a reference to a “cat-o-nine-tails”, that vicious whip used notoriously on ships. It was a collection of individual leather strips bound together at one end but left loose at the other, used as punishment in the Royal Navy and elsewhere including on convicts in Australia. The loose thongs were knotted for maximum hurt. It was “swung” – lifted up by the perpetrator – and then lashed onto the miscreant’s back. A more plausible explanation I think.

A saying with an obvious meaning is that something has as much likelihood of happening as “a snowball’s chance in Hell”. Isn’t this wonderfully colourful? Another easily understood but colourful phrase is “I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole”. It comes, one imagines, from the image of a barge sailing along a canal being propelled – poled -- along by the boatman. Another version of this phrase is: “I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.” Would ten feet be the length of a barge pole?

Then there’s “I’d take that with a grain of salt” (or “pinch of salt”). The meaning is to be sceptical of what’s being presented to you. But I can’t make the connection between a grain of salt and a sceptical opinion. All correspondence entered into!

In Australia there are some delightful phrases for a far distance. We say something’s at” the back of beyond”, or “the back o’ Bourke” or “beyond the black stump”. And if you’re going a far distance, you’re going “out to woop woop!”

My lovely friend Janet in London has contributed “kicked the bucket” which is a curious way of saying someone has “snuffed it” and presumably is the source for a “bucket list”, those things you want to do before you go. Janet said she loathes “passed away” or even worse, “passed”. When her time comes she wants to just plain die!

Another lovely friend, Denise in Lennox Head, has contributed what she calls “a ripper”: “Cutting off your nose to spite your face”. We all know how to use it but what on earth does in mean? And where does it come from? According to a quick dip into Google, the phrase has been around since the 17^th Century. It means not to be self-destructive when seeking revenge.

“So far, so good!” Obvious meaning but how was it crafted? Apparently its first recorded use was in 1721, but why did it catch on, so to speak?

Another interesting phrase is “by the skin of your teeth” to describe a very narrow victory. Teeth don’t actually have skin, so who cooked up the metaphor. In fact it’s found in the Bible, in the book of Job who says: “My bones cling to my skin and to my flesh and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.” (New RSV translation). It might possibly have meant the enamel on one’s teeth but who knows?

This phrase is in the same category as seeing something “in the corner of my eye”. We know what it means but eyes don’t actually have corners.

And while we’re talking words and grammar, I was reflecting the other day on the cavalier way we used to say the most awful things in the Olden Days.

I’m sure you all remember often-naughty Golliwog, the black character in Enid Blyton’s Noddy stories for small children. Apparently Golly was removed from more modern editions of Noddy on the grounds that at various levels the character was a stereotype for people of colour being bad.

If you gave someone something and then took it back, you were called an “Indian giver”. A certain long handled brush used to remove spiderwebs from the ceiling was called a
“Turk’s Head brush”.

Children did a selecting game which started: “Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo, catch a Nigger by the toe …”  And we had boot polish coloured “Nigger Brown”. There was also another children’s rhyme or game which I barely remember but somewhere it had the words: “Ching, chong chinaman …” Early explorers, surveyors and geographers thought nothing of naming features Chinaman’s Beach or Chinaman’s Creek and occasionally Jew’s Hill or the like. When I sat on the Geographical Names Board of NSW we discussed this issue and whether or not these names should be changed. At the time, we left them alone because they emanated from a specific time in Australian history when these appellations were non-controversial. I’m not sure whether they’re still there.

Another phrase which is firmly fixed in time was the expression the Australian troops in New Guinea during WWII called the native New Guineans who helped them navigate the Kokoda Track: “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels”. It was meant well but really, how insulting …

And a last linguistic note … I’ve only found out very recently the meaning of Aborigine. It comes from the Latin ab origine which means “from the beginning”.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations”:

The American writer Dorothy Parker when told that Calvin Coolidge had died: “How can they tell?”

 

 Phrases of life

After telling someone that I’d “dodged another bullet” – some test results came back negative – I started musing on the various interesting phrases we use in everyday speech without thinking too much about them.

I’ve been using “dodging bullets” as a metaphor for not having whatever ghastly disease I thought I was in for, given my symptoms on a given doctor’s visit. Despite having a degree of heart disease and rotten breathing, despite the fact I use a space-alien’s mask at night to help, you’ll be pleased to know that I don’t have a lot of other diseases which kept me up at night worrying.

Another of the commonplace phrases we use without thinking is I/we/he/she has/have “bitten off more than I/we/he/she can chew”. Does it come from an animal exemplar? Who knows?

Many other phrases are actually quite odd yet we use them regardless. For example, “it’s raining cats and dogs”. Why those animals? Couldn’t it be raining lizards and bees, or raining elephants and monkeys? Who knows?

How about: “I haven’t seen (he/she/it etc) for donkeys’ years?” Why donkeys? Where did the phrase come from?

Then there’s the idea that something could be “between Hell and high water”. I get Hell as the low point but why not Heaven as the upper limit.

Have you ever said that something or another had “the ring of truth”? Is that ring as in something on your finger or ring as in bell? And either way, what’s the connection with truth?

We often use the phrase that something or another “looked for all the world like …”. “Looked like” is obvious so why throw in “world”?

How about commenting that something has “given up the ghost”? I suppose it has a connection to something no longer alive but the more I say it the more opaque it seems.

And speaking of opacity, how is it that something is said to be “dead straight”? Really, how did these two words connect? When did “dead” become a synonym for completely, or absolutely or really?

Saying that you might have caught your “death of cold” is also a little weird. I guess it may have come from the Very Olden Days when catching cold might have seemed a precursor to pneumonia when death was not unlikely. But these days?

“Cool as a cucumber” is another beauty. Why not “cool as a lettuce” or “cool as a capsicum”?

Then there’s “as right as rain”? Unless this was coined by drought-stricken Australian farmers I’m not sure what is it about rain that makes it right.

How about “the crack of time” or “the nick of time”? I believe there’s modern cultural usage of the first phrase but I’m thinking about the way we often say these two as casual throwaways. What cracks, or what gets nicked?

I looked up the phrase “mad as a hatter” thinking it came from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland  and Through the Looking Glass where the Mad Hatter was a significant character. But in fact this the phrase had an existence before the mid-19^th Century when these books were published. According to Wikipedia, mercury was used in the manufacturing of felt hats during the 19th century, causing a high rate of mercury poisoning among those working in the hat industry. Mercury poisoning causes neurological damage, including slurred speech, memory loss, and tremors, which led to the phrase “mad as a hatter”. Isn’t it nice to have an explanation?

Of course worrying about the meaning of phrases could have you “at your wit’s (or possibly “wits’) end” meaning you tried everything you could think of but failed. That actually makes some sense.

Which cannot be said for the phrase “time out of mind”! Any explanations appreciated …

I’ve also wondered about “a stitch in time saves nine”. Why not ten, or twenty-seven? I suspect it’s just because of the time/nine rhyme (no pun intended).

One phrase which definitely makes sense is “once in a blue moon”. There is such a phenomenon as a blue moon when there’s an additional moon at certain times in a year. I was going to tell you the precise definition but frankly, I couldn’t understand it!

And just before I close, a nod to Cockney rhyming slang. Your “china” is your mate … “mate/china plate/china”. And a hat is a titfer as in “hat/titfertat/titfer”. Stairs are “apples and pears” and wife is “trouble and strife”. There’s also “telling porkies” which comes from “pork pies/lies! I didn’t come from a cockney speaking family but I recall that we did us the term “titfer” for hat and I still use the term “porkies” for my grandchildrens’ untruths!

So let me know any more strange phrases which come to your mind. And a special callout to my friend Ester who is a highly accomplished Interpreter and Translator. Just imagine what she has to cope with if any of these phrases crop up in her work!

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Richard Nixon on welcoming the moon-landing astronauts back to Earth: “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.”

 Calming effect

 

I live in a disorderly house. Not, I hasten to say, a house of ill-repute or brothel (in the way the two ideas were linked in the Very Olden Days). Just a house riddled with children and mess, the two being rather synonymous. I don’t think our house is much worse than any other house in which children lurk but the one thing it conspicuously lacks is an atmosphere of calm. And calm is something I frequently need.

So I’ve developed calming strategies. None of them involve stuffing myself into tight clothes and running on a machine. Or stuffing myself into tight clothes and running in the street. Or stuffing myself into tight clothes and spending most of my income at a gym.

Since my retirement from the paid workforce I no longer need to awake with the dawn. However, I still get up relatively early so I can perform my morning calming rituals in peace without small people buzzing around. These rituals involve multiple cups of tea and multiple games of Solitaire. If there are no grandchildren up, I may read a book but I have worked out that you need more calm to read than to play monotonous games of Solitaire.

Another calming ritual is cleaning or clearing out. Someone once said that you should make use “of the chinks of time”. I’ve interpreted this to mean those few minutes when you wait for the kettle to boil or wait for someone else to do something else (“go and clean your teeth and brush your hair”) or you’ve got ten minutes before you have to leave the house.

In these chinks of time you can, for instance, tidy a kitchen draw; this is a very satisfying activity and in not very much time, particularly if you drink as much tea as I do and multiply that with the number of minutes you have the kettle on the boil, you can have the whole kitchen drawer problem sorted in no time.

Other kitchen activity which can be “chinked” (I hope you love my neologism) includes sweeping the floor, a quick clean of the microwave, wiping out one kitchen shelf at a time and wiping down the cupboard fronts in sequence. A little pause here for a Grumpy Grandma gripe. The cupboard faces in our kitchen are not only white, the paint is slightly textured and there is double beading on all four sides of each cupboard face which attracts a great deal of dirt and dust. What could have possessed the builders of this house to condemn the kitchen cleaner to constantly having to clean the cupboard faces? Given that most kitchen cleaning is done by women and most builders are men, then our builders must have hated their wives.

The key to all this kitchen activity is that you set a goal which is easily achievable. By the time you finish the task you feel fine.

There is, however, another calming thing to do in the kitchen which takes a long time but is even more satisfying. You book a date with your grocery store cupboard/s to clean and rearrange. This is extraordinarily soothing in process and you feel so satisfied when it’s done. No really, take my word for it. I once spent a blissful hour or so re-arranging my cousin’s store cupboard which, I might add, became a family joke.

Really, really good smells can have a calming effect. Like the smell of frying onions or newly mown grass and of course, the smell of a wood fire. In fact everything about a wood fire is calming including just watching the flames dance. Then there’s gardenias or frangipani and other delicious flower smells – lavender, old-fashioned roses, freesias and even carnations.

As a young person, I soothed my soul when troubled by going into the garden with a large basket and some secateurs. I would cut many flowers, take them into the laundry and arrange them in a variety of vases. The process of arranging the flowers created in my mood a kind of restful serenity which took me out of my miseries.

I suppose, though, that the ultimate in calming activity is listening to calming music. This type of music includes almost anything Baroque and the marvels of Gregorian chant (or as my children used to call it: “Mum’s Church music”). But maybe the pinnacle of musical calm is the huge opus of the extraordinary polymath, Hildegard of Bingen. Her music, sacred and secular, has become so well known in recent years that ABC Classic devotes a whole evening to Hildegard close to International Women’s Day which it calls its Hilda-thon and which is utterly glorious.

So between my kitchen and my music and all the other strategies, I think I’ve finally got calm covered, which for a card-carrying Depressive is a decidedly Good Thing!

 

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Actor David Niven: “You know where you are with Errol Flynn. He always lets you down.”

 Suffering for beauty

 My father once told me that you had to suffer for beauty. This in response to my complaints about the rollers I had to put in my hair overnight, secured with stiff plastic pins. Evidently it was a time when large curls were required. This was the day after hair had to be dead straight. To solve that problem was less painful but much more awkward. Hair had to be either ironed (long hair that is – I doubt the iron treatment worked with short) or wrapped round the head and secured with bobby pins.

Ah, fashion. Even in our suburban fastness we yearned to be up to date.

In the 1950s – and maybe into the very early ‘60s – we wore flared or dirndl skirts held up by layers of petticoats some of which had rope sewn into them to keep them stiff-ish. This was usually topped by a twin-set and pearls. Twin-sets, for the uninitiated, were tight little short sleeved, crew necked jumpers topped by cardigans in the same colour. While pearls finished the outfit, I suspect that was only for our mothers; we may have worn a string of beads but memory doesn’t serve me here. These flaring skirts were just the ticket for rock and roll; in any movie or tv show of the period you’ll see expanses of white petticoats as the girls were thrown back over the boy’s arm. I can’t quite remember if the Bodgies and the Widgies preceded the Rock ‘n’ Roll culture but the flared skirts were in there somewhere.

Into the '60s we suffered for beauty another way. I recall wearing very, very tight trousers made from furnishing fabric with zero stretch, decorated with large florals. They were so tight that you had to stretch out on the floor to pull the zipper up. I rather think the same solution was required for the earliest denim jeans.

As the ‘60s progressed skirts suddenly became shorter and shorter. By the time I turned 21 in 1967 the skirts were so short they should have come with matching undies. There was a parallel fashion called “hot pants” which were shorts of extreme shortness. I still possess somewhere the outfit I wore for my 21^st (a party, by the way, which I absolutely hated as I loathed being the centre of attention). This outfit was a ridiculously short skirt with a little sleeveless top. The fabric was beautiful but honestly, I can’t imagine that I ever wore this. I have also kept a pair of hot pants with beaded turnups, shorter than some swimmers!

Australia’s short skirt history was ushered in by the scandalous appearance at the Melbourne Cup in 1965 of English model Jean Shrimpton in a dress daringly cut to four inches above the knee. This garnered an extraordinary amount of publicity. And while talking British models, do you remember Twiggy of the waif-like stature and the black-ringed eyes who looked for all the world like a famine victim.

Needless to say, short skirts eventually gave way to long skirts; if they reached mid-calf they were midi-skirts or maxi-skirts if they reached the ankle.

And a moment’s reflection on undergarments. After the dirndl petticoats left the fashion stage we went to the slim fitting “slip” as they were called, made of silk or synthetic with very narrow straps. Interestingly, girls’ school uniforms – sleeveless with box pleats usually – were called gymslips; as Americans might say: “go figure!” Your underwear drawer always contained full slips and half-slips just for skirts and I rather think the occasional long slip to wear under evening clothes.

Evening clothes in the ‘60s and probably into the ‘70s always included several long dresses. These were de rigueur for events like weddings or balls. Custom had it in those long-ago days that you needed to have your arms covered for dining, then you could be sleeveless for dancing. So evening dresses often had a small jacket or bolero made to match. I recall also having cocktail dresses; not sure how they were defined but they were always short. If you turned up to a function in the wrong length clothes you were utterly humiliated.

Although I was extremely thin in the Olden Days, I along with all other women in the ‘50s and ‘60s wore “step-ins”, very thick elasticated fabric which trimmed down your hips and tummy and had four hanging tabs to which you attached your stockings. (“Panty hose” came in with increasingly short skirts.) A garter belt which held up stockings without the horridly tight step-in became a sexy alternative, paired with loose French knickers.

From stockings we can segue to shoes. In the ‘60s we had appalling wedgies, shoes with a very thick cork sole. But then narrow, elegant high heels became the vogue and have stayed so ever since. Suffering for beauty certainly applies to wearing shoes with anything from three to four-inch heels, perhaps even higher. Yes, they make your legs look slim and shapely but oh, the agony of wearing and walking in them. In my latter years, alas, my heels have headed south and I have none more than one and a half inches.

And a postscript for a discussion of fashion. A raglan sleeve with a seam which runs from under the arm to the collarbone was named after Lord Raglan, the 1^st Baron Raglan who is said to have devised this style because he’d lost an arm in the Battle of Waterloo. Cardigans were also named after a military man, in this case the 7^th Earl of Cardigan, a British army major-general who led the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War. Apparently British officers wore knitted wool waistcoats during the war which morphed into the cardigan as we know it.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

British writer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge on politician Anthony Eden, once Britain’s Foreign Secretary: “He was not only a bore; he bored for England.”