Sayings from the Old Country
 

These are some of the manners epithets I heard time and time again as a child in England. I seriously suspect they did not travel well:

Want will be your master -when a kids says "I want...."

She's the cat's mother (rude to refer to a female person as "she", should use her name, but "he" is ok)


feel free to add peculiar sayings you learned in your childhood that really don't work/make sense in your current life.....

My dad would say, "Who's she, the cat's mother?"

My buddy says, "How does it feel to want?"

so some of the old country made it across the Atlantic! That's comforting. They look at me like I just birthed a three-headed communist when these slip out here....

The cat's mother one is used commonly in Oz too.

Sibling used to hold his cutlery standing on its end so that the sharp bits pointed at the ceiling. My folks used to tell him that there was a little man in the roof that would fall and impale himself.

It's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Comparisons are odious.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph...

Never heard of the "cat's mother" funny

You don't know shit from shinola!

finer than frog hair

Went for a Burton.

(fell/tumbled)

"Where there muck, there's brass." is what Mom would say to any of us kids who complained about doing a shitty job (like cleaning out the cat box). Sort of along the same lines as when my husbands grandfather would say "Smells like money" whenever they would drive past a pig farm.

My mom's mum (from Rearsby, Leicestershire if that is, in fact, a real place) used to write in her diary "Fell off my bike" as a euphemism for getting drunk.

Did she at least wear a helmet?

"A kiss without a mustache is like a soup without salt" - what my Mom said to me when she met one of my boyfriends who had a mustache.

'Where there's muck there's brass' is probably one of the most famously quintessential Yorkshire phrases. There was a brilliant tv programme years ago called 'Brass', centred on a wealthy Yorkshire family.

'Shaping wooden' is one I have inherited from Ma. If you're faffing about being ineffective: "Come on, you're shapin wooden lass."

Another is: 'stand locking up'. As in "If I don't sort out that bill before it goes red, I stand lockin' up" or, "If I don't get an early night tonight, I stand lockin' up."


I think my favourite though, was the phrase that both mum and dad used to signal bedtime: Come on then, they'd say, 'up tha dances'. For years my infant brain heard that as 'up the dances' and thought that somehow 'the dances' meant the stairs to bed.

Or "beef" (no jokes here, please) "without mustard", as my mum said.

"You can give her the bullets, if you can give her the gun."