“What do you think I just fell off the turnip wagon?”
. . . come from ?
Perhaps from somewhere near "do you think I came up the (river) Clyde on a bike?
Welcome to you and all your turnip friends.
me and my turnip friends thank you, just was looking to see where our wagon went ?
P.S. that’s the first time I’ve heard the river rider version !
BTW, Where is the River Clyde ? ( Just in case I can’t find my bike!)
Turnips became associated with idiocy in the 18th century. The phrase obliquely refers to “turnip-headedness.” You’d call someone a turnip-head (or wurzel-skull, mangel-block, etc.) to denigrate their intelligence, because (before burlap bags became widely-available) root vegetables traditionally provided heads for scarecrows.
Calling someone a turnip suggests that, like a bird-bogie’s, the only thing their head is good for is holding up a hat.
Uh, by the way, I didn’t mean anything by bringing up mangels, cmangle. My face is beet-red.
Welcome aboard!
It’s in Scotland, and flows through the city of Glasgow (and other places of course)
My mothe rusexd to say it but Idon’t think I have heard it for years. I’ve never heard your turnip one, either, so it will be fun to see whether any clever person does know the origin.
Well, that was a novel way of typing that "my mother used to......" and I see that **Larry Mudd** seems to have a sensible answer.I’ve heard the phrase as “I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck”. Johnny Carson apparantly had a hand in popularizing it, but the first person I remember hearing it from was Woody Harrelson as Woody Boyd on Cheers.
Perhaps, but I think in this particular usage what is being suggested that someone who has fallen off the turnip truck is a hick or a rube, and a clumsy one at that - a farm hand who has come to town riding on top of a load of turnips in the back of a truck, and tumbled off into the street.
I agree. And, if anyone can find a cite in print for “fall off a turnip truck/wagon” or something similar that predates 1970, I’d love to see it.
Ah, fie on your breviloquent and transpicuous explanation, Colibri.
It isn’t pretentiously obscure at all.
Where’s the fun in that? 