Brave new world

The other day I decided to list the things I now do on my computer, Kindle or mobile phone which earlier took infinitely more time and were carried out on a raft of other “platforms” like book reading, shop visiting, going to the bank and so forth.

Take looking up directions to get you from one place to another. In the Olden Days you used a street directory. In NSW it was published by a company called Gregory so the directory was called the Gregory’s much in the way the brand name Hoover became the generic name for a vacuum cleaner and Biro, the name of its inventor, the name for a ball-point pen. You looked up a street and suburb name in the extremely small type of the index. You were then referred to a map number with co-ordinates like D7 or K2 to enable you to find what you’re looking for. It was perfectly useful, except when you had to go from one side of Sydney to the other. That required moving from one map to another and could drive you crazy. Now of course we use Google Maps or its equivalent, type in the address and some omniscient female being tells you your travel plan step by step. I do, however, find it a bit spooky when she tells you to move into a specific lane, as if she is really watching you.

I can watch TV or a movie on my computer as well as the television. The fact that you can watch old movies or TV series as well as current offerings is great.

I use my Kindle to read books. Admittedly it means I am less likely to visit the library or the local bookshop, but as I am an omnivorous reader, it is certainly cheaper to buy my books on my device. I also use my Kindle to play Solitaire. When I remember playing Solitaire – or Patience as we called it – with a deck of cards, I also remember the tedium of shuffling and laying out the cards each time you started a new game.

Some research is brilliant on computer. For example, I wanted to be reminded of the variable charges imposed to cross the Harbour Bridge in the days before automatic tolls. I typed my question into the computer and immediately got the answer. I hate to think how long it would have taken me in a library to find the information.

I now order our basic groceries on computer. This is a huge advance on wandering the supermarket aisles with a trolley then having to bag everything after you paid for it, stow it in the car then carry all the bags into the house.

Covid has taught me that you can buy many other things online. Craft, for instance, like knitting wools or embroidery kits or even patchwork kits. Then there is dress and shoe shopping. To my amazement, it is quite possible to outfit myself from top to toe by ordering online. It is also quite possible to spend far too much money outfitting oneself online!

I now use my computer to check my bank account and pay bills, both activities which used to take too much time. You had to wait for your account details which were send to you on paper each month. Bills were often paid with a cheque and sent through the post. I can’t remember the last time I saw a cheque book and I don’t even know the current cost of a stamp. Of course to deposit or withdraw money meant a long queue at the bank, particularly annoying when you had to do this in your lunch hour. ATMs are surely a blessing.

Computers, ipads and mobile phones all make it possible to communicate with anyone instantly. In the Olden Days we had telephones with a rotary dial (I rather think a sophisticated version of the telephone had press buttons). Calls to someone overseas were not reliable as at least half the time was spent yelling “can you hear me”! We also had telegrams, short messages paid by the word and delivered to your home by your “postie”.

The idea that telephones could one day be mobile was presaged by two characters from popular culture: Dick Tracy, a detective who had a wrist phone and Maxwell Smart the ditsy spy who had a phone in his shoe.

The ease of communication today is really breathtaking. I can ring anyone, anywhere and send email messages across the world. We probably don’t need to be so connected but I think the good outweighs the bad in this case.

And, of course, computers allow me to send you, my dear readers, my weekly blog!

And now to what seems to be my weekly offering of interesting phrases. My first offering is calling someone a “smart alec”. Who was Alec and why was he smart?

How about your neighbour’s grandson being “the apple of his eye”. Try as I might, I can’t think of an explanation for this.

My mother would occasionally give us “a cat’s lick and a promise” which meant not giving us a bath but wiping us down with a wet flannel (English Olden Speak for face washer). I suppose it has something to do with the way cats clean themselves by licking their fur but it’s an engaging idea.

“Dragging the chain” is a perfectly understandable phrase, but why was it a chain. It could have been dragging a truck or dragging a dead donkey.

There’s the phrase “on a wing and a prayer”. Again, it’s perfectly understandable and probably dates from the early days of aviation, but why did it enter the language and become quite ubiquitous.

And finally, a phrase I used recently and then noted down: “Done like a dinner!” Again perfectly understandable but why a dinner?

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

US writer Logan Pearsall Smith: “A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.”

 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.”

 

 

 

 

 

 Favourites

My favourite line in all of cinema is not the obvious. I don’t go with “Play it again, Sam” from Casablanca. (In fact that line wasn’t actually said. It was “Play it, Sam”.) Nor do I give the prize to Scarlett O’Hara: "I'll think about that tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day." 

My favourite comes from the first Superman movie. The scene is Niagara Falls. A little boy falls over a viewing platform (I think. He certainly fell over something). Suddenly Superman appears, flies under the boy, catches him successfully and takes him up to the hysterical parents (I think. Well, you would be hysterical if your child fell off the Falls, wouldn’t you.) As you can tell, my memories of the movie are less than precise. But the next bit is graven into my brain. There are two elderly ladies leaning over a fence watching this. One turns to the other and says: “Of course he’s Jewish.” My non-Jewish readers need to understand that proud Jewish mothers and grandmothers are a trope in American society. There is an infinity of jokes about Jewish mothers, who all want their sons to be doctors or lawyers or just about any profession of high status. In case you’re wondering, they don’t seem to have similar ambitions for their daughters; they just have to marry the doctor or the lawyer!

My second favourite quote comes from one of the Lord of the Rings movies, possibly the last one. The heroic band of ring rescuers are at a wall in the midst of battle with some obnoxiously ugly enemies. They need to get over the wall but Gimli the dwarf can’t make it.  Legolas the utterly beautiful elf person offers to give him a leg-up. Gimli snarls: “Nobody tosses a dwarf!”

My third favourite comes from Dirty Dancing when the equally beautiful Patrick Swayze says: “Nobody puts Baby in the corner." This precedes a fabulous dance routine which finishes off the movie.

I’m sure there are dozens more but the brain is resisting when I try to remember.

And now to more phrases of life – sorry, I just can’t help it!

Someone is said to be “sharp as a tack”, or “neat as a pin”. I get the first, but what is neat about a pin. Then there’s the saying “for two pins…” Why not “for two cans of beans” or “for two oranges”? For that matter, why “two” in the first place?

If you think someone is probably telling a bit less than the truth, you could “take it with a pinch (or grain) of salt”. Why salt? And while I’m on salt, why did the older members of my family throw a pinch of salt over their shoulder for some particular reason now lost to me. And there was some other superstition about putting a coin inside a handbag if you were giving it as a gift; I suppose the meaning if that is reasonably obvious. I think there were other superstitions too, but with the current brain resistance to remembering they aren’t coming back to me.

We say something is a pigsty if it’s a dirty mess; but we could equally say that same dirty mess is an Augean Stables.

We can be “sober as a judge”, which is perfectly understandable. We wouldn’t want someone presiding over affairs who was “as drunk as a lord”. But why are we said to be “as sick as a dog”? Where do dogs come in?

We can say a child is “a regular little bagpipe”; why not a flute, or a clarinet?

I was intrigued by the saying “close but no cigar”. So I checked on Encyclopaedia Google and found this: It comes from traveling fairs and carnivals from the 1800s. The prizes back then were not giant-sized stuffed teddy bears, they were usually cigars or bottles of whiskey. If you missed the prize at a carnival game, the carnie folk would shout, “Close! But no cigar!”

And Carolyn has suggested that the “all the ducks in a row” idea might refer to the rigid arrow pattern which some birds assume would make it easier to kill more of them.

Yesterday I found myself saying: “As right as rain”. What in earth is right about rain? It completely mystifies me.

Just to finish up, a gorgeous saying which came my way recently: “I’m not an early bird or a night owl, just a permanently exhausted pigeon.”

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations>

Playwright George Bernard Shaw: “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.”

 Household helping

 

My eldest grandson apparently works on a nine-day week. And on each day he wears a new pair of pyjamas. When I fold up his washing each week the collection of PJs is beyond normal. Not that they are, in fact, “pairs” of pyjamas. It’s usually an assortment of bottoms matched (or rather unmatched) with some t-shirt-type top. And why is it that as an almost-teenager he believes the floor is the correct place to store any garment which has touched his hands? Each day he apparently pulls out a selection of t-shirts and shorts, decides which he wants to wear, and drops the rest on the floor. Some, indeed, migrate under his bed.

I don’t think I expect him to be tidy. I don’t remember my own sons’ being particularly neat. But given I’m (mostly) the Bilgola Plateau washer-woman, I’d just appreciate one washing load per child, not two as is the case with the almost-teenager.

I rather pride myself on my washing skills. In the seven-odd years I was a home-mother I mastered stain-removal. I still have a collection of wonderful home-hint books which tell me the hundred things you can do with vinegar and another hundred things you can do with baking soda. There are also cleaning jobs which utilise Borax (I can’t remember what Borax is) and others which require ammonia which I duly purchased for the new house and have not yet used.

I know that the residue of the almost-teenager’s regular nosebleeds comes out of pillow slips and bedding by soaking in cold water. (Why are pillow covers called pillow slips? Another verbal conundrum.) I know that his disgustingly filthy school tops need a good soak with a powerful stain remover; you can’t just throw them in the wash and hope for the best. I know to check all pockets for tissues otherwise the navy shorts come out with white shreds all over them.

I have other housekeeping skills as well. For example, tea or coffee-stained cups can be soaked for a short time with bleach and water and they come out pristine. Bleach water is also great for cleaning vases with slimy dead flower water in them. Glass vases come out absolutely sparkling

I think I told you before of the marvellous trick for cleaning silver cutlery and other silver pieces. Line a big bowl with Alfoil, put in your silver, throw a handful of bi-carb soda on top and pour in boiling water – magic clean!

When you clean out your fridge, wipe it over with vanilla dropped into water. It leaves a lovely smell.

In decades gone by, when I was young, my mother and I used to get up after the meal (cooked by my mother) and head to the kitchen. My father and brother retired to my father’s study (grrrrrr!!). After my mother washed up and I dried, we would soak the tea-towels (another verbal query – why not pot-towels, or saucepan-towels, or coffee-towels?) in soapy water and each morning they were rinsed out and hung up to dry. In our house today, we no longer dry anything; what doesn’t go in the dishwasher dries in the dish rack.  (I know God is a woman! A man god would never have bothered to invent a dishwasher.) Our tea towels are used to wipe our hands, a huge no-no in the Olden Days.

Now although I thought I’d reached the end of my “phrases”, it appears I have not. So here are another few which popped into the space which is my mind over the past week.

Take “dressed to the nines”. Why not “… the tens” or “…the seventeens”?

We say something is as “dead as a dodo”. Now obviously this refers to the Dodo, a large and tame flightless bird hunted to extinction when Europeans came to its home island of Mauritius. But I would suspect that more than half of the people who use the phrase have never heard of the Dodo and the sad story of its demise. And why isn’t it “dead as a dinosaur”, equally euphonious and equally extinct. In fact I think I’m going to start using the latter just for fun. Maybe it will catch on?

There are many phrases which unkindly refer to a person with a less than average IQ. There’s “a sandwich short of a picnic” or “not the full quid” for example. There’s also the phrase I heard recently to refer to a gay man: “Camp as a row of tents”.

Someone you are happy to see is said to be “a sight for sore eyes”. I suppose it suggests that someone or thing is so good to see that it might cure sore eyes; but it’s exceedingly odd.

A related phrase usually applied to beautiful girls is “a diamond of the first order”. I get “diamond” but can only suppose that “the first order” is a way of implying that said diamond is of the highest quality. But then what of “a diamond of the first water”? Mysterious!

We can have “a whale of a time” which presumably means a really great time, but why “a whale”? What about an elephant?

In another animal metaphor, if we’re organised we can say “all our ducks are in a row”. Why ducks? Why a row?

And another contribution from Denise in Lennox Head. Someone referred to her small granddaughter’s good behaviour by saying “butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth”. We all know what it means but how did it get there?

 

Quote of the week from Chamber’s Dictionary of Modern Quotations:’    

From US humourist Will Rogers on the statue of the (one armed) Venus de Milo: “See what happens if you don’t stop biting your fingernails.”

 Even more phrases of life

 

Well I thought I’d done my dash last week but the use of “done my dash” has decided me to add to my collection of phrases we all use and which pepper our speech (there’s another one!).

Done your dash probably refers to finishing a running race – the hundred metre dash perhaps. And as for something “peppering” our speech, it’s confusing. The phrase means that we sprinkle our speech with something or another but I don’t think it means “spicing” it up.

This week I found myself using a lot of these phrases including two which refer to one’s state of health. Once I said I was “sub-par” and on another occasion that I was “under the weather”. Neither of these make particular sense. Sub-par is used to refer to something which is less than it should be and yet in golf, having a round which is below par is a good thing. I can’t imagine where “under the weather” came from, whether it refers to good weather or bad weather and what being “under” it could possibly mean. Yet we all know what we mean when we say it.

“Wreaking havoc” is a good phrase. In this case its meaning is perfectly obvious but it’s the use of that marvellously Biblical word “wreaking” that gives it its punch. Another phrase with what I think might be Biblical origins is “the writing is on the wall”. I wondered if it came from the famous scene in the Book of Daniel of Belshazzar’s feast. Mysterious writing appears on the wall during the feast: Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin. A terrified Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, sends for the sage Daniel who interpreted the words to read: “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” When we say “the writing is on the wall” we usually mean something bad is afoot so it could well have the Biblical origin.

Not Biblical but “in the ballpark” (American I guess, for a baseball field) are expressions like “Damn it to Hell” a particular favourite of mine, “good Heavens!” and “for Heaven’s sake”. I would bet that none of us think of Heaven and Hell when we use these phrases but I suppose they may have originated some time ago when people had a clear view of what they thought could be blamed for one and praised for another.

I don’t think this is Biblical but making a “rod for your own back” brings to mind those religious penitents who walk a trail lashing themselves with whips. Or perhaps some serf having to carry a load of rods on his back.

I’ve already talked of “the skin of your teeth” which means you only just managed to achieve something. There’s also the skin off your nose as in “it’s no skin off my nose” if you don’t do “x” or “y.

Something is said to be “not a patch on” something else meaning not nearly as good as. And yet if you patch a garment it means a lesser look so obviously has nothing to do with the phrase.

Why do we say “a hatful” of something? Like, “I’ve had a hatful of that behaviour!”. Are we referring to an upturned bowler hat full of something?

And what are ”odds and sods”? Is it just a marginally amusing rhyme or does it actually mean something? There’s also “bog standard” meaning the most standard, but why attach the idea to the word bog which in this country means toilet.

These days my grandson tells me that some version of the word cahoot means some application or another in the tech world of things I don’t pretend to understand. But in my generation someone could be said to be “in cahoots” with someone else, a phrase with a slightly sinister air suggesting those parties in cahoots with each other are up to no good.

Also from the slightly sinister world comes “all bets are off”. I have no idea what it comes from but it means that everything is over or finished.

Before I end I’ll just throw in “over the top”; we all know what it means but why that particular phrases. And, finally, “chief cook and bottle washer” – we joke that in our household my daughter is the cook and I’m the bottle washer but why bottles? Why not frying pans or baking dishes”? This is destined, I feel, for perpetual confusion.

 

Quote of the Week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

This clerihew from Australian-born poet Peter Porter:

“In Australia

Inter alia,

Mediocrities

Think they’re Socrates.”

 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.”