Not true, secundum Snopes.
That’s where Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) got his pen name. On the Mississippi River, the knots were at 6-foot (1 fathom) intervals. The deck hand on the bow would drop the lead line to “sound” the distance to the bottom. The call of “mark twain” was 2 fathoms, a safe depth for most riverboats.
Boy, we sure have talked about this one a lot on the Straight Dope. See threads here, here, here, here, and herefor starters.
All this time I thought it was referring to those little toy Cymbal banging monkeys.
Hmmmm, I’ve only heard the term to mean sunglasses. Could be a regional thing.
“Cheaters” are mentioned in the song “Jeepers Creepers”:
Golly gee
When you turn them heaters on
Woe is me
Got to put my cheaters on
It makes sense that her eyes are so bright, he has to put sunglasses on. Reading glasses don’t make any sense.
I always thought calling reading glasses cheaters was because you couldn’t read with your otherwise functional natural sight and had to cheat with the glasses.
Thanks - Looks like its never to late to teach an old dog new tricks - funny how that seems apt in this thread…
I’ve always heard “swing a dead cat” too.
How about the phrase “red up” to clean up? This is an odd one to me
Oh oh oh! True story: my dizzy Gracie Allen-like high school English teacher told us the story of how Mark Twain got his name. “Mark Twain was sitting on the docks of the Mississippi River,” she told us, “and one day he heard a deck hand drop the lead line and shout, ‘SAM-UEL CLEM-ENS!’”
Regional Note: The terms redd and redd up came to the American Midlands from the many Scottish immigrants who settled there. Meaning “to clear an area or to make it tidy,” redd is still used in Scotland and Northern Ireland; in the United States it is especially common in Pennsylvania as the phrasal verb redd up. The term, which goes back to Old Norse rydhja, can be traced from the 15th century to the present, particularly in dialects of Scotland and the North of England
from here redd up
Wow, this clears up a minor mystery from my childhood. When I was in elementary school (1980s) one of my little friends had made up a song about wanting to be a turtle. My mother found this very amusing and told me that there was or used to be a sort of secret club called The Turtles, and that it was all kind of a joke but there were members all around the country. To find out if someone else was a Turtle you asked “Are you a Turtle?” and they would answer with…a joke that she couldn’t remember. Having read the Peanuthead’s post, I assume she actually did remember the answer but realized at this point that it wasn’t a good phrase to be teaching to a little kid!
IIRC she also said that either she or my father (who’d been an attack pilot) once had a Turtle pin but that she wasn’t sure what had ever happened to it. I see such a pin is pictures on the Wikipedia page.
I’m well over 50 and I never heard of a Turtle club, altho I’ve heard the joke. I knew “around Robin Hood’s barn” from upstate NY. “Dog in a manger” is from Aesop’s fables, as well as “sour grapes” and probably other expressions. I think these expressions are not used as much as they used to be, on radio/TV or books, etc. And many are based on rural experience or technology no longer in use, or fables, mythology, biblical quotes, etc. My grandmother called a frying pan a “spider.”
“Adventure Ho!” (or derivatives like “Studying Hooooo!”) Seriously, I’ve gotten so many blank stares followed by asking me why I was talking about an “adventuring whore” or whatever. At first I just assumed people were fucking with me and making a bad pun, but no… they had no idea. Seriously, we had Thundercats and everything “Thunder. THUNDER! THUNDERCATS HOOOOOOOOOO!” Come on guys. Please? Is it really that obscure? I mean, I guess it doesn’t show UP that often, but that’s because it’s such a stock phrase it’s practically a cliche by now.
One doozy I had of late, I think might be age related. In my team, we tend to get a couple of graduates each year starting their rotation program, so kids in their early 20’s.
I told one of the them other day that this particular submission I was getting him to write, was straightforward, and that he didn’t need to write war and peace.
He just stared at me for a moment, “What do you mean” He said. :dubious:
I would have assumed it was a joke about a sailors who cry, “Land ho!”
As a 21 year old, I can say that I don’t find that phrase obscure at all. I mean, if you know anything about War and Peace, you know it’s long. In fact, in my computer science class I came up with the idea of testing the speed (for kicks, it wasn’t required) of our B-tree word indexing project using the Gutenberg .txt of it specifically because it’s known for being a doorstopper. Most of the people (50 or so that actually did it) thought it was funny and got the joke. I think either my class was odd or your students are odd.
Yeah, but that’s because, to a degree, it kind of is. It basically just means “adventure onward” or “studying imminent!” It’s basically the same thing as “Land Ho!” It is NOT about prostitutes, however.
Exactly, but if you are in Freshman Literature, reading Moby Dick, and one of your classmates comes in late because she was at the school office, just as you are begininng Chapter 54, it is still funny to say “Well, speaking of the Town-Ho!”
I have nothing against that joke :D. It’s just when people stare at you bleary eyed, assuming “ho” unambiguously and in totality means “whore” it gets a tad tiresome to explain.
The post you quote doesn’t say “room to swing a cat” but “room to swing a dead cat,” so “swing a cat” isn’t a subset of the latter phrase.