FURTHERMORE
By Gerry Moran
This week, dear readers, some phrases, and catchphrases, that we are familiar with – but not with their origin. So, let’s start at home, well sort of – seeing as how many of us are Kilkenny ‘cats’ – here’s one that we all know very well – ‘letting the cat out of the bag’ as in giving away a secret.
Well, the phrase goes back to market places in England many years ago. Traders would try to deceive unwary customers by putting a cat in a bag, claiming to would-be purchasers that it was a pig. Buyers would purchase without close inspection only to let the cat out of the bag and realise that they’d been tricked.
Staying with cats – we’re all familiar with ‘no room to swing a cat’ which has nothing to do with a cat. The cat in question is the ‘cat of nine tails’ a whip used for flogging rebellious sailors. The expression refers to the cramped conditions on board ship which weren’t large enough to carry out the punishment successfully; hence the flogging took place on deck. And then there’s ‘raining cats and dogs’. This very old expression is linked with the ancient beliefs of sailors; in Norse mythology cats were associated with heavy rain and dogs with storms and the wind. And so ‘raining casts and dogs’ came to be associated with severe rainstorms.
Now it’s many, many years ago when I was an altar boy in the Black Abbey and a few of us would stand outside the church after 12 o’clock mass selling a magazine called, if I remember correctly, ‘Spotlight’, a Dominican publication, ie. a religious periodical. And I remember some of the hard chaws slipping out of Mass after the last Gospel and looking long and hard at the magazine. And then, one of them asking: “Is there e’er a bit of leg in that, lads?” We had no idea what he meant. But we made enquiries and soon learned what he meant. And so to the origin of ‘to show a leg’. It is believed to be a naval expression. It derives from the time when women were allowed on board ship and the order ‘to show a leg’ was given first thing in the morning to identify that a woman was asleep in the bunk and allowed to lie on unlike the men who had to get up and put their shoulders to the mast to keep things nautical.
Then there’s ‘meeting a deadline’ (which I am desperately trying to do as I write, think I’m going to make it, Ed). [You did, thanks – Ed]. The original ‘deadline’ referred to a line marked out some distance from the fence of a prisoner-of-war camp during the American Civil War. Any prisoner crossing it was likely to be shot.
‘Donkeys Years’, as in a very long time (haven’t seen you in Donkeys Years), we are all more than familiar with and is reckoned to be a variation on donkey’s ears which, of course, are very long. An alternative expression for a ‘a long time’ is ‘yonks’ which perhaps comes from the sound made by a donkey.
‘Burying the hatchet’ meaning coming to peaceful terns with an enemy, or opponent, comes from the American Indian custom of burying tomahawks and other weapons as a sign that hostilities between the native American and the white settlers had ended (don’t think the whites, however, buried their guns).
We all know what ‘shambles’ means – the word comes from the old English ‘sceamel’, a table or stool, used by meat vendors in the market place. (There is a narrow street in the city of York called The Shambles). I could be mistaken but we had an area known as ‘the shambles’ here in Kilkenny around where Dinny Meaney had his butcher shop.
To ‘speak off the cuff’, ie. to speak without preparation, probably comes from the practice of a speaker writing down all the points he wished to mention in a speech on the cuff of his shirt sleeve.
‘Red Tape’ something I think, that we are all allergic to, comes from the former use of a reddish colour tape to tie up bundles of official documents.
Finally – a new word (at least to me) JOMO. It means the Joy Of Missing Out – feeling content with staying in and disconnecting as a form of self-care. Love it.
And thanks, Mags, for that.
