Reading over a lot of these expressions, I don’t think they’re particularly dated. They may vary from region to region and family to family, but I wouldn’t call them “obsolete.” I understand them perfectly, and not (I think) just because of my age. I’m sure they’re still being bandied about in one form or another by native English-speakers everywhere.
When an expression or other collocation loses its original meaning entirely, that’s what I consider to be obsolete. Not even Shakespeare scholars are sure of what he meant in a lot of his writings, because the original sense of the word or phrase has been lost to us in the mists of time.
When something I was playing with as a kid happened to be particularly loud, Like a drum, or similar, my grandmother would say “I wish I had that, and you had a feather up your ass, then we’d both be tickled.”
My old buddy’s dad would say “If we had ham we could have ham and eggs if we had eggs” said when we didn’t have something simple we needed like a screwdriver
Heh. My dad used to say that. Friday I emailed my boss to let her know I was logging off. I said, ‘If we had any corned beef, we could have corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick’s Day – if we had any cabbage. So I’d better go get some.’
In those languages in which I’ve encountered it (German, Catalan and IIRC Swedish) it means a quarter after two. It is the first quarter of the third hour. The plural “quarters of” means three quarters of, so quarter to.
One from my paternal grandmother that I’ve had people tell me they learned from her: “is somebody bleeding?”
My family was usually the biggest group of kids in that pool club, so it wasn’t unusual for other kids to join in. Often us olders would be shepherding two dozen to thirty little ones, some pre-verbal, some that we didn’t know who they belonged to… In any case, whenever any of us went to our grown-ups in a hurry and tried to interrupt, Abuelita would ask “is somebody bleeding?”
“Uh… no.”
“Then it is not urgent. You stand there and wait for us to finish the conversation we’re already having.”
We’d wait patiently and eventually be rewarded with her full attention. Most of us caught on relatively quickly on the notion that merely by standing close and in her sight we would sooner rather than later get asked “yes, [Name], what is it you want?”, without the need to interrupt.
If the answer was “yes!”, though, she’d drop anything and everything and get on the case yesterday. We didn’t have a lot of yeses, but she certainly did teach a surprising amount of people about prioritizing, politeness and the importance of giving your full attention to whatever it is you happen to be doing.
My mother still called the refrigerator the icebox, and the record player was the Victrola (regardless of brand). The weirdest one was that she called roller coasters “scenic railways,” after one at Coney Island. (I believe that the original Scenic Railway was at Margate in the UK.)
My mother said that sort of thing. A quarter of three means 2:45. A quarter of without further specification means “fifteen minutes before the top of the next hour.” As in, “You’d better get going, your appointment is at quarter of.”
Some more from my mother:
It’s half past freckle time meant “I don’t know what time it is because I’m not wearing a watch.”
Hell’s a-poppin’ meant “This is pandemonium,” used as a general-purpose expletive.
All around Robin Hood’s barn meant “the long way around.” Often said of driving a long way to go a short distance as the crow flies because of getting lost or missing a turn or the absence of a direct route. Robin Hood’s barn, she explained, was the great outdoors.
Cold as heaven, naturally, is the opposite of “hot as hell.”
Some from my father:
fart was a slow driver, especially an old man who drives slow. As in “Move, fart!”
zoot was one additional unit, dose, or measure of a substance. As in, “That cough sounds bad; you should take another zoot of Robitussin” or “This soup needs another zoot of salt.” I have no idea where this usage comes from. I have never heard anyone outside the family use the word this way.
A slouch was a clumsy person, or more usually an interjection used when he saw someone doing something clumsy.
And one from my grandmother: She was born to be a rich bitch with the minor complication that she was poor most of her life. Anything or anyone she didn’t like was dismissed as “common.” Modern music was common. Modern fashion was common. Poor, working-class, and lower middle-class people were common (herself excepted of course).
Dad’s was ‘It’s a freckle past a hair.’ But it was a smart-ass remark, and not that he didn’t know the time.
There was a movie where a school principal(?) announced that the drama club would be presenting Hell Is A Poppin.
Dad would warn about the ‘little old man in a hat’. Male drivers of a certain age tended to wear hats (real ones, not ball caps), and tended to drive slowly.
I heard Michelle Obama use this one. Well, it was her character in a movie, but it’s one my grandmother always said: “God helps those who help themselves.” In the movie, Barry-O took her to task (lovingly, of course) for that. Don’t know how’d my grandmother would feel about that, either.
“The world always needs ditch diggers”. Usually said when I was acting lazy, this was somehow supposed to spur me to work harder at… well, many times it was digging ditches.
“People have no idea how much money there is in this world.” Pretty accurate, if you ask me. (My grandmother was big on Money Mantra’s)
We were so poor that if someone was selling mules for a nickle all I coulda done was jump up and down yelling “Ain’t that cheap!” - Grandmother, discussing her youth
Let her rip, tater chip! - Mom, when encouraging one to do something
Stop. look, listen and smell for horses - Grandfather, teaching us how to safely cross a street. A paved street. In a town with no horse traffic…
Just think how good it’s going to feel when it stops hurting - Dad, most anytime someone injured themselves.
Remarkable. A third possible meaning that I could not even conceive of.
That does seem to be the consensus in this thread (I see I’m not the only one that’s baffled). I doubt I’ll ever get used to it, since the idiom has lost all trace of its origins, and I don’t hear it often enough to internalize the idiom.
