In the MPSIMS thread about odd measuring units, something has come up that I’d like my fellow Dopers to help me with. It’s a literary cliche that I’d always thought was a racial ephitet that has since lost its origin and bite, much like Paddywagon. And directed against the same people. I’d always heard it as having to go 'round Robinson’s barn.
But, AskNott, to use the example I’d most recently seen, knows it as thus:
How many people have heard this line as ‘round Robin Hood’s barn?’ I’d never encountered that version of the cliche until I started poking about the Web, after college.
I’m not familiar with those expressions either, but I have heard the expression, “She looks like she just stepped out of Robin Hood’s barn!” Meaning, “She looks like a million bucks!” Anyway, this is not what you’re looking for, but it does suggest that in the popular mind, Robin Hood has a barn.
Never, ever heared “Robinson’s barn.” I have hear “Robi Hood’s barn.” Perhaps this is like those mis-heard song lyrics?
The context I’ve heard is “We had to go all around Robin Hood’s barn to find the store.”
See, Robin’s an outlaw. He can’t live in a building because the Sherriff of Nottinham would find him there. So he lives in the woods. Presumably his barn is also the woods. So this phrase always meant, to us, “I had to wander all over the countryside” and was ususally used in cases of getting lost or taking the long way.
I’ve never heard anyone imply that it had anything to do with beauty.
Mom explained it as Sailboat did, but up until now, I never heard anybody else use it. As I said in the other thread, I suspected she cadged a UK expression because she married a Nottingham.
I still like my mother’s corruption of several themes… If something was a big, convoluted hassle, my mother would declare it a “round robin hood’s nest”. I’m sure if she’d know the “Robin Hood’s Barn” phrase, it would have made its way in there as well.
After a searching the web I have only come across one mention of this phrase in the UK. This was on a website called “Buckinghamshire Vocabulary”. The explanation goes thus :-
“all round Robin Hood’s barn,” = in all directions, everywhere, on all sides. “I’ve looked all round Robin Hood’s barn, and I can’t find him.” The considerable stretch of country which contained Robin Hood’s provisions (deer, etc.) might metaphorically be called his “barn,” and so the phrase be applied to any large space..
I have never heard this expression before , even though I now live in Nottinghamshire.
I have heard and used it. It means just what people have said. I’ve generally heard it in the context of someone making an extremely complicated and meandering explanation for what turned out to be something that really had a simple answer. “Boy, we really had to go around Robin Hood’s barn to get to that?”