Well, what have we learned today, class? When arranging a date, never use the phrase “Quarter of” because there’s a good chance you’ll miss each other by half an hour…
I listen to a lot of Brit-Lit audiobooks, read by narrators beautifully intoning the Queen’s English. So I often hear *“half five” *or its ilk.
I actually had to look it up… it’s 5:30.
The most confusing I’ve come across was “I’ve taken my time here and finally finished reading the book at half seven in the afternoon the next day. Simply because every little detail was of extreme importance.”
Huh, I googled it and found a review of a Barcelona Boat Party: “After all, they run from half five until half seven in the afternoon, have some of Barcelona’s best DJs playing on board and the booze is as free flowing as the water you sail upon…”
I would think that using that phrase at a pool club could be dangerous, if you run into literal-minded kids who know that their drowning buddy is not bleeding.
Two of my mother’s expressions I find myself using from time to time:
“Use your head for something besides a hatrack!”
“It’s colder than a brass monkey!”
(Years later, she confided that the entire phrase was “than the balls of a brass monkey.” She was a lady of the old school, don’t ya know…)
My grandparents always called it that. Curious thing is that I was too young to know what “the icebox” literally meant, and by extension I had no idea the term was an anachronism. In turn, until I was 10 or 12 years old, I just thought “icebox” was just another term for a refrigerator.
Saw the topic of this (zombie) thread and immediately thought of my mother, who would say, “That’s much milder.” She meant that something was better or fixed. Straighten a picture…“Much milder!” I think it came from her New England background.
Same here. I didn’t realize the fact that the Kramdens on The Honeymooners still had an icebox in 1955 meant that they were poor. We and everyone we knew already had a refrigerator by then time (not that we were well off ourselves.)
There’s a whole lot of guessing about Dick’s hatband on the internet; in my opinion, it’s really Nick as in the devil. But a lot of people think otherwise. Short answer: no one knows.
Hadacolwas a patent medicine in the 1940s with a 12% alcohol content.
One of my late husband’s expressions (he would have been 80 this year) was, when someone was confused, “He doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind.”
He would also say when someone was happy, "He’s shickled titless.: