Just back from doing a spot of grocery shopping. I’ve never noticed before but, thanks to this thread, I observed that the place where the trolleys go back has signage above ‘Trolley Return’.
It will be an exciting Saturday in the Gerbil household. This morning I’m probably going to have to go to Tesco for my messages. We are low on cheese, but they have a bogof on my favourite brand. I’ve got a relatively small car, but the boot is quite large.
This afternoon, one of the local churches has organised a car boot sale. I will probably go a long and see if I can grab a bargain.
messages - groceries
bogof - buy one, get one free.
boot - trunk
car boot sale - guess… 
Really?! I’ve never heard this before. Where are you from?
It sounds like some sort of Victorian euphemism…you don’t want people to know you do your own shopping, so you say you’re going out to get your “messages”.
They would probably do a double take and wonder where your horse is before eventually realising you were talking about a trolley but would be too polite to say anything 
“Trolley park” had another, very different, meaning in late-19th-century America.
Another vote for trolley.
Slang bonus: Being “off your trolley” or simply “trollied” is UK slang for being drunk (or insane).
I’m going to guess Scotland; that’s the only place I’ve ever heard it in the wild.
Yeah, but pretty much anything can be used as slang for being drunk.
I don’t hear it much anymore but when I was a girl I was always being sent to the shop for Mum’s messages. It was a common expression in Aus in the '50s and '60s but it’s not something which is said much anymore.
It’s a common saying in Scotland. I wonder what the derivation is, as thinking about it for the first time ever, it does seem a bit odd.
Isn’t it off your trolley meaning insane and trollied meaning drunk? That’s how I’ve always used them.
Messages is new to me. Nice to learn something new.
Yes, that’s exactly what I intended to say but I phrased it incredibly poorly.
Thank you :o
So if you said “Excuse me, I have to see a man about a horse…” would they be even more confused?
(Or is that a very local thing where I am?)
Or “Excuse me, I have to see a man about a dog…”
From Fife in Scotland. Not sure how widespread a term it is, but I’ve certainly heard it throughout Scotland. A message line is a shopping list. Message bag is the bag you would carry your messages in, and it would be your own hard wearing bag that would get reused.
Logical, yet totally inexplicable.
The day you start calling it a ‘shopping buggy’ is the day when victory is mine.
It’s also standard in Hiberno-English.
As I recall, the modern-day shopping cart was invented in Oklahoma in the 1930s, so Americans get to name it. I remember this bit of trivia because the heirs of the inventor all live or lived in Hawaii and were undergoing a bitter estate battle at the time I lived there, so big it was constantly in the local news.
Well, back in the early days of cars, you could have taken that trunk out and attached it to the back of the car for storage. Which is where the word “trunk” as applied to a car comes from.
In the Southern US “buggy” is the term used by most people.