nordmann wrote:

Spanish Fly doesn't qualify as a euphemism. It is actually made from a blister beetle found commonly in North Africa and introduced to Europe via Spain.

Norm, my father once made the grievous error of referring to a hammer as a "Glasgow Screwdriver" while working on a ship with an all-Glaswegian engine crew. Not a mistake to be made twice ...

Of course, round here it's known as a Brummagem screwdriver.

How about "doolally" or "doolally tap", supposedly from Deolali, where Indian Army officers who finally crossed the line where even their colleagues noticed they were not on the same planet were sent for treatment? Or "NFN"?

PaulRyckier wrote:

(how do you do the Cyrilic letters? Do you have a font?)

Hello Paul

if you have Microsoft Word then you can find them via; Insert - Symbols - Symbols - Subset - Cyrillic

P.S. I once heard someone try to link the English word 'spree' as in 'going on a spree' with the name of the River Spree in Berlin. I wasn't convinced though. It seemed too tenuous and just a co-incidence. Does anyone know?

P.P.S. Gilgamesh - what is "NFN"?

Doesn't sound likely to me either. I have checked dictionaries and they have not been useful - Shorter OED said orig. unknown. Old Chambers said Orig: slang which seems to me to be begging the question. And some other book of words said it was from an Irish word.

"Spraoi" (pronounced the same) is an Irish word roughly equivalent to "total abandonment of responsibility" or "on a bender". It equates pretty well to the Norse word "sprø" which is now used to mean "crazy". I doubt either was the origin of the German river's name, though both overlap nicely with the English "spree".

NFN - "Normal for Norfolk" - see http://www.literarynorfolk.co.uk/normal_for_norfolk.htm



Actually, "Brum" or "Brummagem" for Birmingham is supposedly derived from Bromwich, as in West Bromwich ...



A local term for an unnecessarily strung-out explanation, or journey, is "going all around the Wrekin"

Vizzer,

and I forgot, as you rightly put the emphasis on the second syllabe the "o" of the first syllabe becomes silent and turns into "a" and so it has to be pronounced a bit as the Dutch "a". Don't know how to compare with an English vowel? Bit as the "a" of "flaw"? Then the pronunciation of "voksal" is more "vaksáál"? As from "bolshói" it is "balshóój" with an "o" as in the English "know"?

Kind regards and with esteem,

Paul.

Would these qualify...

Shangri-La an earthly paradise but particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia


El Dorado a legendary "Lost City of Gold” that fascinated explorers since the days of the Spanish Conquistadors.

I would say they do qualify - even though we now know that both places are entirely mythical, their usage to represent specific concepts euphemistically originated amongst people for whom they were very real places indeed, extremely elusive but as "factual" as any other remote place learnt of through repute, not direct experience. The Garden of Eden, Olympus and Åsgard would be in the same bracket, and many others I imagine.

I'd stop short of "heaven" or "nirvana" however in pursuing that notion. They were admittedly also portrayed as if they were "places" but were always meant primarily to convey a state which by definition defied geography.

'til we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land.' Conceptual no doubt but very confusing when singing it as an 9 year old.... along with imagining the arrows of desire we so fervently asked to be given. However, starting off the day with confused song in a church school paved the way for disbelief in much else imparted that day - especially the need for knowing for what 14 and7/8 times 13 and 2/3 was; we did rather advanced maths there.

Nordmann...

Your mention of ‘Asgard’ reminds me of my years sailing in Irish registered ships and the lads I sailed with... they often mention the ‘Asgard’... and I knew it to be the Irish navy’s sail training ship... I berthed alongside her in about 2002 in Arklow... she was a fine two masted ship. I’ve Googled her, and found nothing but keep coming up with Norwegian pages, so what was Asgard, a mythical Norse land, or god...?

Asgard was a yacht that ran guns to the IRA in advance of the 1916 rising. Later in life it became a naval training ship. The one you saw would have been its successor in that role, Asgard II. It sank in 2008 off Biscay.



Åsgard (pronounced Oh-skard) is the destination of Norse warriors killed in battle. It doubles as a Norse heaven and also the cradle of the world in Norse mythology. Unlike most mythologies Norse includes a prediction and description of the end of everything. This begins in Åsgard.



Åsgard's most famous inhabitants are Odin, Thor, Loki etc. They are not there because they were born there necessarily. Odin, for example, is described as having been born in an area now in western Russia. He fought his way to leadership of Åsgard.

gee thanks for that... i got nothing about its role as a yacht on google. I'll try Asgard II.

Priscilla wrote:

'til we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land.' Conceptual no doubt but very confusing when singing it as an 9 year old.... along with imagining the arrows of desire we so fervently asked to be given. However, starting off the day with confused song in a church school paved the way for disbelief in much else imparted that day - especially the need for knowing for what 14 and7/8 times 13 and 2/3 was; we did rather advanced maths there.

Yes - I always found Jerusalem to be a deeply depressing dirge at school. I can't understand the appeal it seems to have for some people.

P.S. Along with Shangri-La and El Dorado there is also Xanadu which was the subject of at least 2 different pop songs in the 1980s.

Doesn't "Cloud Cuckoo Land" come from Aristophanes "The Birds"? And where in all the cosmos is "Planet Susan"

Quote :

I would say they do qualify - even though we now know that both places are entirely mythical, their usage to represent specific concepts euphemistically originated amongst people for whom they were very real places indeed, extremely elusive but as "factual" as any other remote place learnt of through repute, not direct experience.

So Ultima Thule and even Tir nan Og would qualify too? And what about Camelot?

There is no Planet Susan, but there certainly should be a star called Susan!

Belfast born Susan Jocelyn Bell discovered, in 1968, the first observed pulsar. In fact she helped coin the term (short for pulsating radio star). She even designed and over two years physically constructed the radio telescope used to detect it. Then, for another two years she single-handedly analysed over 400 feet of chart output produced every 4 days as the telescope completed each sweep of the sky, this daily task eventually yielding a half-inch anomaly that she noticed, targeted and then identified as radioscopic pulsation. Having identified the feature, analysed what it must be, and then mapped its shift, size and distance, she handed the data over to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. They proceeded to confirm her data and the lab's director, Tony Hewish, won that year's Nobel Prize in physics for his "discovery". Worse, that which should have most obviously been called Bell's Star (what a great name) went on to the astronomical charts thenceforth as "CP 1919" (the CP standing for "Cambridge Pulsar") as Hewish was obviously too modest to take all the credit for himself. He let his lab take it instead.

Susan married that year and left her position in Cambridge. Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, as she is now known, is still at the cutting edge of spectrum analysis in astronomy and makes no bones about the shoddy treatment she received at the hands of the Cambridge astronomical fraternity (there's a clue in that last word as to why). When the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia awarded her the Mitchelsen Medal jointly with Hewish for their work with pulsars in 1973 her acceptance speech was witty, terse, and to the point. Her last academic role was as Head of Physica and Astronomy at the Open University.

Thule would - it even had co-ordinates and was drawn on maps (Hy Brasil too). Tir Na nOg doesn't - it was retrospectively concocted from several myths in combination in order to tell a christian parable. At the time it was invented it was designed to be fairy-tale (thereby demeaning the Ossianic myths which previously had been extremely important to non-christians). Camelot sneaks in - there are even today people who brook no other possibility than that it is real and it certainly has euphemistic usage.

That was why it was dubbed the "No Bell-Burnell prize" of course.

In the book I was reading (Patrick O'Brian's Post Captain) he writes (of an ignorant social-climbing woman), "Mrs Williams had heard of castles in Spain but she could not remember if they were good or bad: they were certainly one or the other." (In this case the castle in Spain was actually a literal one.)

IIRC the French equivalent is a castle in Scotland.

Vizzer wrote:

PaulRyckier wrote:

(how do you do the Cyrilic letters? Do you have a font?)

Hello Paul

if you have Microsoft Word then you can find them via; Insert - Symbols - Symbols - Subset - Cyrillic

P.S. I once heard someone try to link the English word 'spree' as in 'going on a spree' with the name of the River Spree in Berlin. I wasn't convinced though. It seemed too tenuous and just a co-incidence. Does anyone know?

P.P.S. Gilgamesh - what is "NFN"?

Vizzer, thanks a lot...

Kind regards and with esteem, Paul.

Up the Creek!

How did I forget that one? Once the foremost Royal Navy Hospital, now like the rest of them no longer in use and with a question mark hanging over the future of Theodore Jacobsen's impressive and huge 18th century building, the location of the site on an island seperated from the mainland by Haslar Creek was no accident. In its early years the hospital was designed with as much a view to stopping patients escaping as to curing them. Naval casualties from Trafalgar to the Second Gulf War have been admitted there over the centuries since its inception in the 1760s, and for many such poor souls the journey into the hospital complex, via the main entrance situated up Haslar Creek, was to be their last, especially in its first hundred years of existence when traumatic injury and what were then new and inexplicable diseases such as malaria and scurvy were tantamount to a death sentence for the afflicted.

The expression "up the creek", which started as gallows humour amongst the ratings, has now become universally understood in the English language as heading into a disaster from which there is little chance of reprieve. I wonder how many people realise that the creek really existed for many, and in fact is still there to see? Nowadays the area, with its once little town of Alverstoke now a posh suburb of Portsmouth (inhabited by the "alverstocracy" according to locals), is evocative of retirement homes, wealthy denizens and quiet leafy idyllic scenery, and "the creek" now signifies something quite different from the terror-laden image it once conveyed to thousands of unfortunate young men over centuries.


The picture shows St Mary's Church in Alverstoke on the creek, about a mile from the "gate of terror" for so many.

A query - wasn't "El Dorado", the Golden One, supposedly a person rather than a place?

The confusion seems to have arisen over how exactly one interprets the phrase "the land/place of El Dorado" ("Tierra/Los El Dorado") . By Walter Raleigh's time the English had got it into their heads that it was definitely a place, but then that's the English and "foreign" languages for you.

Mind you, de Quesada didn't help matters when he styled himself, after a disastrous expedition to the Llanos plains east of the Colombian cordillera, "Governor of El Dorado". This ironic reference to the fact that his expedition had bankrupted the Colombian colony where he had long wished to be recognised as governor and in which he was the most powerful colonist is the only Spanish reference to El Dorado as a specific place (the Spanish were well aware of the original legend in which it denoted a chieftain - after all it was they who had given the eponymous central character in the story his Spanish title). When de Quesada died shortly afterwards his original tomb in Suesca bore this very inscription, fuelling later rumours that he had in fact founded a colony by that name but had held its location secret. Avaricious and less than scrupulous freebooters like Raleigh fell for this interpretation. A quick peek at the 16th century equivalent of a Spanish holiday phrasebook could have saved them a lot of money, heaps of bother and many lives lost for nothing.

"Bridewell" as a slang term for the police cells (still used by some in the legal community) would probably count. The original Bridewell was in London - I think it might have been on the site of the later Fleet prison of Mr Pickwick fame - but the name started to be linked to provincial lock-ups, notably in Leeds. It now refers to the cusrody area at a police station, where criminal defence lawyers might say "I've got one down at the Bridewell".

A Glasgow kiss?

"Getting off at Edgehill" as a slang term for withdrawal prior to ejaculation. Edgehill is the final station on the line before the terminus at Liverpool Lime Street. The phrase may be limited to the north west, but was popularised by the eternally amusing Profanisaurus in Viz comic many years ago, along with other regional phrases such as "approaching the Billy Mill roundabout" (you don't want to know).

Regards,

AR

Quote :

"Bridewell" as a slang term for the police cells (still used by some in the legal community) would probably count. The original Bridewell was in London - I think it might have been on the site of the later Fleet prison

The final gatehouse to Bridewell prison was constructed in 1802 and amazingly has survived in situ up to this day, still with the strong prison gates on their hinges (for the record the address is 14 New Bridge Street). The bust over the arch is Edward VI. It was he who donated the original Bridewell Palace to the governors of the newly formed hospital (as it then was) in 1553.



Its rather rapid shift of usage from hospital to prison was probably for more or less the same reason that Edward didn't want it, or for that matter why Henry VIII also quickly tired of it after having confiscated it from Wolsey, who even himself seemed none too sorry to part with it. In appearance the original palace seemed well appointed - well built, on a good road connecting city with Whitehall and with fantastic river access. In practise the river in question, "the Fleet Ditch", had by the mid-sixteenth century become probably the world's largest ever open sewer, despite several attempts over the years to keep it clean and navigable.

To the navy's 'up the creek' and the army's 'doolally tap' can be added the air force's 'gone for a burton'. A term of disputed origin but which I've always understood to refer to Burton-Upon-Trent and its ale brewery. During the Second World War missing aircrew were said to have euphemistically "gone for a burton" or "gone down for a burton" - i.e. no longer on active service but now enjoying a well deserved beer either in the great alehouse in the sky or literally "down in the drink".

Similar to Bridewell for police cells there's also The Clink as prison generally after the notorious Clink prison in Southwark (the Bishop of Winchester's turf again) though the name of the original prison may simply be onomatopoeic after the sound of rattling chains or of doors being bolted.

And further to Dutch cap and French letter ... there are also all the old names for syphilis, known as the French pox or Spanish pox by the English, the Neapolitan disease and then later the English disease by the French, the French disease by the Germans and Italians, the German disease by the Poles, the Polish disease by the Russians, the French disease by the Spanish, the Spanish disease by the Danes and Portugese, and the Christian disease by the Turks, .... and in northern India the Muslims blamed the Hindus while the Hindus blamed the Muslims, although in the end everyone blamed the Europeans. However despite its probable place of origin, nobody seems to have called it the American disease ... that name was later used for yellow fever.

Islanddawn wrote:

Beware, of Greeks bearing gifts.  

Prefer Mad magazine's version "Beware of gifts bearing Greeks"

How about "Stellenbosch"
from Wikimisleadia "In the early days of the Second Boer War (1899–1902) Stellenbosch was one of the British military bases, and was used as a "remount" camp; and in consequence of officers who had not distinguished themselves at the front being sent back to it, the expression "to be Stellenbosched" came into use; so much so, that in similar cases officers were spoken of as "Stellenbosched" even if they were sent to some other place."

I've been Stellenbosched a few times. Usually by the chenin blanc.

ferval wrote:

I've been Stellenbosched a few times. Usually by the chenin blanc.

 Ferval, now you have to explain "chenin blanc" to me

Your friend, Paul.

A picture is worth a thousand words, Paul.




To be honest though, that is rather posher than I'm accustomed to.

How about, Spanish practices or Spanish customs, to mean irregular union practices? Didn't Thatcher's use of the term during one of her battles with a trades' union lead to a formal complaint by the Spanish ambassador?

And there seems to be an almost universal trend to equate "the government" with the official place of business, regardless of the particular branch of government or where they are physically based. Thus one reads about the actions of Whitehall, Westminster, Downing Street, Brussels, the Whitehouse, the Kremlin, the Elysées Palace etc .... all meaning "the Government", while the actual government department involved might well be based in Ealing or Swansea or Dusseldorf or wherever. Similarly one talks about "West End" plays which might never have been performed in London, and of financial decisions by "The City", which might not even have been decided within the UK.

Another one are the word shanghai/shanghaing/shanghaied and their connection with the port of Shanghai.

Going back to the  time when men were being kidnapped and then forced to serve at sea

Another nautical expression - "Malta Dog". It is basically Brucellosis. Has other relevant names such as Crimean fever, Gibraltar fever,Mediterranean fever, rock fever (presumably the "rock" is Gibraltar. Not sure if it is connected to Delhi belly, though.

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:

Another nautical expression - "Malta Dog". It is basically Brucellosis. Has other relevant names such as  Crimean fever, Gibraltar fever,Mediterranean fever, rock fever (presumably the "rock" is Gibraltar. Not sure if it is connected to Delhi belly, though.

Delhi belly might be equated with Gyppy [Egyptian] tummy.

Why the saying " Chinese Whispers" and what is it's connection  with China???

That's a very good question, Dirk. I hadn't thought about it so went surfing to see what I could find. This sounds the most reasonable and plausible explanation, from The Phrase Finder - though I hadn't realised just how recent a coining of phrase it was (and have never heard of Russian Scandal).


Chinese whispers

Inaccurately transmitted gossip. 'Chinese whispers' refers to a sequence of repetitions of a story, each one differing slightly from the original, so that the final telling bears only a scant resemblance to the original.

The expression 'Chinese whispers' is commonly used in the UK and many other parts of the English-speaking world, although less so in the USA. It derives from the party game in which one person whispers a message to the person next to them and the story is then passed progressively to several others, with inaccuracies accumulating as the game goes on. The point of the game is the amusement obtained from the last player's announcement of the story they heard, that typically being nothing like the original. The game is played in all parts of the world and each country has its own names for it, notably, in the USA it is usually called 'Telephone' or 'Gossip'.

The name 'Chinese Whispers' was adopted for the game in the UK in the mid 20th century, prior to that it was known as 'Russian Scandal' or 'Russian Gossip'. The reason for the change isn't clear. It is sometimes suggested that the phrase is a racial slur and is intended to convey the idea that the Chinese talk nonsense. I see no reason to assume that. The English aren't especially badly disposed towards the Chinese - there are many other races on the UK hit list above the Chinese. I think the decision by whoever coined the phrase had more to do with the Chinese language being more incomprehensible to English ears than Russian. If there is any racial stereotyping inherent in the phrase it may be by an association with the idea that the Chinese are inscrutable.

The first citation of the name in print is found in the English newspaper The Guardian, March 1964:

The children's game of 'Chinese whispers'... in which whispered messages were passed around the room and the version which came back to the starting point bore no relation to the original message.

The use in a more general sense, to describe everyday misstelling of stories, began as recently as the 1980s. It first started appearing in print and in online postings in Usenet newsgroups in 1989. This was probably a consequence of the use of 'Chinese Whispers' as the name of a track on the 1985 album Stereotomy by The English rock group The Alan Parsons Project.

nordmann wrote:

Chinese whispers

The first citation of the name in print is found in the English newspaper The Guardian, March 1964:

That date is a surprise ... I remember playing Chinese Whispers, (together with pass the parcel and musical chairs etc.) at children's parties in about 1966 or 67 or 68. Gosh weren't my parents trendy!

We played it in the Brownies and at parties at least 10 years before that but did we call it Chinese Whispers? I feel sure we did but perhaps not.

That of course made me think of the classic example:

Send reinforcements. We are going to advance.

Send three and fourpence. We are going to a dance.


and that itself has an interesting history.

It (or what may have been the original version) appears first in print in 1914 in a publication called “Temperance Caterer” in an article headed “Altered in Transit”. This version reads:

Whilst on manoeuvres, a brigadier commanding a certain brigade stationed in Aldershot passed the word to the nearest colonel to him :—

“Enemy advancing from the left flank. Send reinforcements.”

By the time it reached the end of the right flank the message was received :—

“Enemy advancing with ham-shanks. Send three and fourpence!”.


With several variations, some including such things as Wild Italians and Pressing pants it popped up throughout WWl on both sides of the Atlantic and on into the twenties and thirties including one which featured the advance/dance and reinforcements/three or four cents combinations in Boys' Life, the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America recommending it as a camp fire game and calling it Message Relay. That might explain my Brownie connection.

During WW2 it reappeared but reset into a contemporary context.

Yes, I've gone off at a tangent again, sorry.

In yacht racing,  Corinthian crew are unpaid/non professionals - taken from, or so I think,  the time of Salamis when even the effete of Corinth were trained to man the new triremes - slaves being  somewhat less motivated. 
And a sail  twisted with wind on either side of it is called a Chinese gybe; this is usually noted with expletives (assorted) just before capsizing.

Isn't 'Corinthian' generally used alluding to amateur athletes and sports persons and the (alleged) ideals thereof? The 'Corinthian spirit' is the expression I'm most familiar with.

An example more specific to a particular building or in this case institution, is 'bedlam' as in 'It was bedlam in the streets at Christmas'. Any others like that?

Then there are all the localised ones, incomprehensible to anyone from further away and often to younger folk. My children, I suspect, wouldn't have a clue if I said someone was Going via Strone and Kilmun'. It means something like as Going all round the houses in explaining something but not actually getting to the point. The two villages are on the shores of the Clyde estuary, quite visible from the other side, but getting there by road involves a long, complicated journey over high passes and round various sea lochs and then when you finally get to Strone, the road ends.

Nielsen wrote:

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:

Another nautical expression - "Malta Dog". It is basically Brucellosis. Has other relevant names such as  Crimean fever, Gibraltar fever,Mediterranean fever, rock fever (presumably the "rock" is Gibraltar. Not sure if it is connected to Delhi belly, though.

Delhi belly might be equated with Gyppy [Egyptian] tummy.

Might also require a spell of "Egyptian P.T." aka mattress testing.

Meles meles wrote:

Oh and how about: "Come Hell, Hull or high water"?

I'm sure it relates to Kingston upon Hull, but what is the origin of that expression I wonder?

A poem from the 1620s by poet John Taylor is called The Vagrant’s Litany:  

'There is a proverb and a prayer withal,
That we may not to three strange places fall;
From Hull, from Halifax, from Hell, ‘tis thus,
From all these three, Good Lord, deliver us.
This praying proverb’s meaning to set down,
Men do not wish deliverance from the Town;
The town’s named Kingston, Hull’s the furious river;
And from Halifax’s dangers, I say Lord deliver.
At Halifax, the law so sharp doth deal,
That whoso more than thirteen pence doth steal;
They have a gin that wondrous, quick and well,
Sends thieves all headless unto Heaven or Hell.
From Hell each man says Lord deliver me,
Because from Hell can no redemption be.
Men may escape from Hull and Halifax,
But sure in Hell there is a heavier tax.
Let each one for themselves in this agree,
And pray – from Hell, Good Lord, deliver me.'      

It’s also known as The Beggar’s Litany or The Thief’s Litany. The exact title Taylor gave to it is unknown. John Taylor was one of the most popular poets of his day and was an archetypal working-class hero, who hadn’t even attended grammar school and yet his work sold widely among all stata of society. However, he is little known today. Taylor worked primarily as a boatman on the river Thames and his poems tended to be set on or near water and were often themed on crime and punishment. He is also sometimes held up as proof of the existence of an actual, real and singular William Shakespeare because Taylor mentioned the Bard in one of his poems only 4 years after Shakespeare’s death.
 
As can be seen in the Litany, the saying ‘from Hull, from Halifax, from Hell, Good Lord deliver us’ was already in existence at that time and John Taylor’s verse was an attempt to explain it. The reason why the ‘furious river’ Hull was feared is believed to be that if one were held in gaol in Kingston’s gatehouses or blockhouses, then one was in danger of drowning because the dungeons there tended to flood when the river was high. In other words, don’t get yourself arrested in Hull for whatever reason as you’re quite likely to forfeit your life even before being brought to trial. The term 'come Hell, Hull or high water' seems to be a variation on the same theme.

(Incidentally, the Halifax gibbet in the poem was a precursor of the guillotine and was mentioned by nordmann on the False inventor thread.)

I went looking for John Taylor's poem and was interested to see it is called In Praise of Hemp-seed. My husband was very involved at one time in his work for a nfp agricultural board in trying to get our government to legalise hemp, which they were reluctant to do because of its associations with cannabis, even though it is quite a different product. The poem refers to a number of poets some of whom I don't seem to know (Silvester and Daniell for example) and goes (and is actually credited to John Tyler (though I found it by googling John Taylor): 

In paper, many a Poet now suruiues
Of else their lines had perish’d with their liues,
Old Chaucer, Gower, and Sir Thomas More,
Sir Philip Sidney, who the Lawrell wore,
Spencer, and Shakespeare did in Art excell,
Sir Edward Dywer, Greene, Nash, Daniell.
Siluester, Beumont, Sir Iohn Harrington,
Forgetfulnesse their workes would ouerrun,
But that in paper they immortally
Do liue in spight of death, and cannot die.

Vizzer wrote:

And from Halifax’s dangers, I say Lord deliver.
At Halifax, the law so sharp doth deal,
That whoso more than thirteen pence doth steal;
They have a gin that wondrous, quick and well,
Sends thieves all headless unto Heaven or Hell.

 "Jeddart Justice", Jeddart being a local term for the town of Jedburgh. 

In the late 16th century, at the height of cross border reiving, "Jeddart Justice" was the expression used for the summary execution of known or suspected reivers.