Insecticide and other stories

My bathroom appears to be a cockroach incubator. When I turn the light on at night in my all-too-frequent trips to the loo, there is sometimes a cockroach baby scurrying around on the floor. I’m fairly sure they incubate in the drain of my sink along with the very small spiders I’ve mentioned before. And, of course, the middle of the night is when the granddaddy cockroaches come out to play.

While I really loathe most small beasties, I find I’m not all that keen to kill them. So wherever possible I catch them and take them outside. I’m not nearly as kind to the pantry moths for whom I happily set traps, given that I simply can’t find where they are breeding. But I intend to have another big go at the pantry cupboard and take absolutely everything out for moth checking.

I’m better disposed to ants. I find their ubiquitous-ness fascinating. Out of nowhere, it seems, they march across the dining table to collect the crumbs, and when they’ve done their job, disappear. I give them a solemn talking-to when I’m about to wipe down the table and suggest they move away from my cleaning cloth. Frequently I bang the table to scare them into retreat.

By contrast, I become completely hysterical at the sight of large, hairy garden spiders of the sort we called tarantulas when I was young. I know they are not dangerous but I am petrified when I come across them. At our house in the Eastern Suburbs, they would come inside if it was raining as we mostly kept the sliding doors to the balcony open. Although they just sat quietly at the very top of the wall, I couldn’t sit anywhere near them. As a child, my bedroom in our Pymble house (perhaps all our bedrooms), had a single brick high up on the wall with holes in it for ventilation, but with no mesh over it. So when rain came one afternoon, it brought with it a damp “tarantula” which sat on my wall. On my way to bed I spotted the creature and screamed for my parents who were eventually able to remove it. But every night after that, for quite some time, I would pause at the threshold of my room and try to jump onto my bed, afraid there would be a tarantula lying in wait on the floor. You can tell this was a traumatic event for small me, as I still remember it all nearly 70 years later.

I’m not absolutely sure why I’m regaling you with insect stories, but at least they’re not reptile stories. I simply fail to understand the attraction most children have to reptiles. My almost eight-year-old went to a reptile show in Mona Vale and loved it, particularly touching the snakes. He also liked the extremely boring frill neck lizard we had for a while, which has now gone on to bore another family. Our small Pineapple Conure (South American bird) has infinitely more personality than any reptile.

And now back to phrases which just come rolling in, including phrases I have actually used recently.

First is “put the kibosh” on something, to shut or stop something. When I checked the spelling, I found a very long disquisition of possible origins for the phrase and a reference to a book discussing the issue!

Another phrase I used last week is “cheap as chips”. Now it’s probably true that chips were cheap, but so is bread and butter, but “cheap as bread and butter” didn’t catch on. I suspect “cheap as chips” is simply euphonious; it sounds better to the ear.

I’ve been suffering from a pinched nerve in my arm caused by a wrist sprain and found myself saying my arm was “rat shit”. Why rat shit in particular and not the faeces of some other creature? And what does shit of any particular sort have to do with pain?

Have you ever used the phrase “everyman and his dog” as in “everyman and his dog was there”? The meaning is absolutely clear but why that particular phrase?

You can say “I took it with a grain of salt” meaning you had a healthy scepticism about what you’ve been told or read. And yet it’s not immediately clear why the phrase came together. Obviously a grain of salt is a very small thing, but it could have something to do with the seasoning properties of salt. I am left wondering.

The meaning of “so far, so good” is quite transparent, yet you have to wonder how it became fixed that way. The same for “let sleeping dogs lie”. Apparently it is a very old usage and a version of it is even in Chaucer. But why dogs in particular? One explanation claims that dogs are very unpredictable when woken suddenly; I’m not convinced.

How did the expression to learn something “off by heart” gain currency? And its possible opposite: “a memory like a sieve”?

“Back to square one” is another phrase the meaning of which is immediately obvious. But why those words in particular? Why “square one” and not, say, “line one”?

It “goes against the grain” probably has its origins in woodwork, but what about “in the swim of things”? Could that be a reference to swimming with, not against, the tide?

And finally, Denise has a lovely example of those family sayings like not walking under a ladder which get stuck in your mind. Her mother used to say: “You never stir anything with a knife because you’re stirring up trouble”.

 

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

Playwright George Bernard Shaw, on dancing: “A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.”