Thanks for that! It includes the bizarre catch-phrase ‘Walker!’ which apparently came from ‘the chorus of a popular ballad’ in Victorian London. This catch-phrase would be entirely forgotten, except for its (somewhat mystifying) inclusion in A Christmas Carol.
Now we use “Bueller?!”
We’re so much more advanced.
And you may use it… IF you know what it means, and from whence it comes.
That’s what drives me crazy about my mom. Whenever we kids would ask her about one of her many idioms she’d just shrug and say “Oh, it’s just an old saying…” and one of us would ask her "AND…? Were you about to tell us what it means?"
“Oh, no, I have no idea.”
How can someone have so little curiosity about something they repeatedly say? (And this seems to spill over into other areas of her life: “Well, I read that somewhere, and if it isn’t true, it should be.”)
Now, in her nineties, she’s had two additional generations question her sayings. I inwardly feel vindicated when she asks a kid about a “tide-me-over” and he does a double-take: “Whoa… Great Gram, what the HECK does THAT mean?”
When she shrugs it off again, I sometimes pile on and ask* “Is that one of those Tide Pods I’ve read about, that people your age chew on? Or is it the hard tack and rum that pirates would snack on until The Tide came in and their ship could float away?”
*I’ve asked this exact same question hundreds of times since I was that great-grandkid’s age…
I mean, “tide me over” means that i have enough of something to get me through some temporary trial… Like having enough food now that i won’t be hungry until supper. Or enough money to pay the rent until i start getting paid by that new job i started. And… If your mom used the phrase, i would think you could figure out what it meant from context.
I don’t know the etymology if that’s what you mean. I don’t know the etymology of lots of words and phrases. I would assume it originally meant something like using the high tide to get over some minor obstacle. But i don’t see how knowing whether that’s true or not is important to using the idiom.
I don’t know the etymology of “idiom”, either. I suppose i could Google either.
Same thing with my ex-in-laws, but you have to remember that they couldn’t just get on the internet and google the etymology like we can. They knew it meant something, and that was good enough.
I’ve certainly heard and used “tide me over” to mean doing an interim holding action until more definitive permanent action can be taken. Usually in the context of a shortage. “There’s no way to get lunch, so this Power Bar will tide me over until dinner.”
I have never heard, read, or used it as a noun phrase: “I’ll use this Power Bar as a tide-me-over until dinner.” The broad meaning is the same (presumably), but I’ve just never heard it in that form.
As to your Mom, are you saying she has no idea of the idiomatic meaning and she just said/says it at random times in random circumstances, or do you mean she doesn’t know or at least can’t explain the etymology of how the dictionary meaning of the words somehow became this different idiomatic meaning and how it became them popularized? Big difference.
I know what the idiom means. I can make plausible guesses at how it possibly came to be from the raw dictionary definition of the components, but I certainly don’t know.
As others have said, those of us of the internet era, even if we came to it later in life, take for granted that any question of knowledge, even folk knowledge, can be trivially looked up and answered in seconds. So we do.
For people of high native curiosity, this is a catnip-filled era. I can spend hours looking up stuff I randomly encounter in the world.
In Ye Olden Dayes of Yore (=pre 1995), there was no such capability. A LOT of what we’d label “curiosity”, they’d have called “idle curiosity”, which is to say “Curiosity that cannot be answered and so retaining the question simply represents useless mental clutter. Accept, Ignore, and move on.”
I have a middle-aged friend from South Dakota who uses ‘a horse apiece’ unironically. AIUI, it’s equivalent to 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. Probably based on the idea that horses, in general, have a similar distance they can travel in a day; going this way is shorter, but it had a lot of hills, so it’s a wash, a tank of gas either way, a horse apiece.
This seems closest. This internet source suggests it is a sea-faring term, first attested in 1627 by John Smith of Pocahontas fame.
The most recent WordMatters podcast includes some fun examples (“succulent bivalve”?!?):
Another interesting question is which catch-phrases are picked up and used, and which are dropped. “What a shocking bad hat” is completely gone, but “O.K.” is alive and going strong–I hear it when my colleagues are speaking Hindi, so it seems to have spread beyond English. “Tiding over” is alive, “to the bitter end” is alive. Will “the cake is a lie” survive? How about “cromulent”, will it jump from the occasional ironic use to normal conversation? Only time will tell.
What was the category that brought up clams?
This will be the most interesting to watch. Will the word ‘cromulent’ remain cromulent?
I’ve occasionally used it, not without keeping its origins in the back of my mind, but still, as the legitimately best word for “a thing, especially a word, that some may consider dubious at first glance or whose worthiness is currently being debated, but is nonetheless perfectly acceptable.”
That’s elegantly and oddly recursive. Cromulent means exactly what it is.
They never explained why “succulent bivalve” was such a popular expression in 1925 that a guide to writing admonished that a good writer should cut back on its overuse!
That was the funny thing — catch phrases are so obvious to people while they’re popular, they need no further explanation … yet leave future readers utterly baffled.
Yes, this is the focus of the podcast (direct link to specific episode below) … how unpredictable this process is.
How about someone who can’t resist channeling their inner Michael Scott whenever phrases like these are said in an innocuous context:
- This is really hard
- Is it in yet?
- It won’t fit
- It’s too short / it’s not long enough
In case someone’s not familiar with The Office, the obvious stupid joke is:
THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID HAR HAR HAR
Well, clams are still quite popular around here, and while the designation ‘quahog’ is better known in these parts than elsewhere, ‘succulent’ and ‘bivalve’ are have been on the list of highfalutin words for a long time so no surprise that they didn’t catch on.
Totally off on a tangent, there are the words ‘falutin’ and ‘highfalutin’, but according to Merriam-Webster, there is no word ‘faluting’.
Probably not. Although I found one site that backed up your version, the majority say the phrase originated in Texas in the late 19th century and had nothing to do with harvesting the crop.
Here’s a typical one: Grammarphobia
The phrase “cut the mustard” originated in late 19th-century America. The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as “slang (originally U.S.),” and says the noun “mustard” here means “something which adds piquancy or zest; that which sets the standard or is the best of anything.”
The OED says the the phrase and its variants mean “to come up to expectations, to meet requirements, to succeed.” The variant phrases “to be the mustard” or “to be to the mustard” are also defined as “to be exactly what is required; to be very good or special.”
The dictionary’s earliest recorded use of “cut the mustard” is from a Texas newspaper, in an article about legislative debate:
“They applied several coats of carmine hue and cut the mustard over all their predecessors” (Galveston Daily News, April 9, 1891).
The same newspaper used the phrase again the following year: “Time will reveal that he cannot ‘cut the mustard’ ” (Sept. 12, 1892).