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“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice.”

Ditto on yesterday morning’s weather, but it’s a bit colder than it was. TV was so bad last night I don’t even remember what I watched. Mostly it was just background noise so I managed to go through and toss away several catalogues and magazines. I even found a couple of gifts for people and a couple of recipes for me.

Yesterday my sister and I were talking and all of a sudden my mother entered the conversation, sort of. I mentioned someone I knew had a tough row to hoe. My mother used to say that, and it sort of just flew unbidden out of my mouth as I haven’t heard it in years. I didn’t understand it when I was really little and later I couldn’t figure out how a farm metaphor became part of my mother’s lexicon. Both my parents had favorite sayings. My dad called someone a good egg, and that was a high compliment indeed. I always understood it, but in Ghana I found out exactly what it meant. When aunties (women sellers) came to my house with eggs to sell, I bought only those eggs which fell to the bottom of my bucket of water. They were the good eggs. Dressed to the nines always threw me, but I finally figured out from the conversation what my mother meant. I did wonder why dressed to the nines, not the tens or the fives. I didn’t find what that one meant until not that long ago. It seems the very best suits used a full nine yards of fabric. The kiss of death was one of my mother’s. I thought it meant Judas at the Last Supper, but the Mafia co-opted it to mean giving a kiss to someone marked for death prior to his execution.

I suspect there are many expressions my grandparents used which may still be around though their meanings have probably disappeared. Some of ours will have the same fate. I doubt my grandnephew will know why we tell him to roll down the window or hang up the phone. I wonder if he knows clockwise. His watch has no hands.

Right now I’m going to turn on the TV.

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16 Comments on ““For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice.””

  1. Christer.'s avatar olof1 Says:

    November 15, 2015 at 3:01 pm

    We’ve had a similar day to the one we had yesterday but chillier and now the temperature has dropped to 28F. Thankfully the wind died totally so it doesn’t feel that cold. I do hope we’ll get clouds later tonight because I really don’t want to scrape the car windows tomorrow morning 🙂

    I’m trying to remember old sayings but my mind doesn’t want to help me at all, I feel a bit tired. An apple never fall far from the tree is one, meaning a child usually behaves like the parents and not in a good way 🙂

    A hare never shoot close was one I had problems understanding since I never had seen a hare using a gun 🙂 but it means if You’re a coward You won’t even try and we say that if someone tries something and fails and if someone is bragging about something that it is doubtful that he/ she actually has done we say empty barrles sounds the most. I guess that is what my brain managed to come up with right now 🙂

    Have a great day!

    Christer.

    • katry's avatar katry Says:

      November 15, 2015 at 4:38 pm

      Christer,
      Haven’t been out since earlier to day, but my heat keeps coming on so I know it’s cold.

      I think your mother would have to say it multiple times for it to stay around in your head. My mother certainly did.

      I never heard of the hare one. I’ll have to look it up.

      Have a great evening!

  2. Richard's avatar Richard Says:

    November 15, 2015 at 3:28 pm

    Mymymy … Sleeping in today, yes? Not yet ‘shiver’-y, but … umm … ‘crisp.’ Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. ‘Zesty’ and ‘snappy’ are both right out.

    I’m so happy to see the term ‘tough row to hoe’ used in its original form. Too many times I’ve seen it bastardized into ‘tough road to hoe’ (¿Qué?). How does one ‘hoe’ a road? That’s right up there with ‘Towing the line,’ which is also wrong. Its original uncorrupted form is ‘Toeing the line,’ a reference to a line drawn on the ground, usually with a sword, on which volunteers for a particular mission placed the toes of their boots. Should things like this matter? In a word, yes. Words. Mean. Things.

    The link between your dad’s expression and the practical reality of its origin is an excellent case in point. Virtually every cook knows this method of checking the ‘health’ of an egg, but over time the link to the term’s origin becomes corrupted, leaving the words but not the process knowledge.

    The nine yards of fabric have a connection to another phrase, ‘The whole nine yards,’ a reference to the nine yards of bullets used in the belt-fed machine guns of WWII American bombers. “I gave him the whole nine yards” meant the gunner was out of ammunition at that point and needed to load another belt. It didn’t necessarily mean he succeeded in neutralizing the threat, although twenty-seven feet of .50-cal ammo is an awful lot of neutralizing power. I’m not going to launch into the origin of ‘awful’ and its transformation from conveying a sense of awe to describing a sense of terror. That’s a story for another time …

    Your speculation about the eventual fate of our own colloquialisms is valid. Recently I came across a cartoon in which a teacher asked her students whether Daylight Saving Time meant the hands of a clock were rolled forward or backward. One of her charges was shown asking ‘What’s a clock?’ … He’d have known if it had an ‘i’ in front of it …

  3. im6's avatar im6 Says:

    November 15, 2015 at 3:44 pm

    I only discovered this, so it’s too late to do much more. But light a candle and sing Happy Birthday to Pet Clark. She’s 83 today.

  4. Caryn's avatar Caryn Says:

    November 15, 2015 at 4:30 pm

    Hi Kat,
    Every time I hear hard row to hoe, I think of Big Brother Bob Emery and his ukelele theme song. 🙂 “The little row we have to hoe, oh boy, that’s hard.”

    My mother had weird sayings. The weirdest one I can remember is “shoes on the table, married before you’re able,” which was usually said to me because I had a habit of putting my shoes on the table. I have no idea what the phrase means. Able to what? Be a responsible adult who doesn’t put shoes on the table?

    The one I use most often is “not wishing bad cess” to someone. I think I got it from a school friend’s mother. She was not Irish so who knows where she picked it up.
    And then there’s the really old one I came across in the Ancient Greeks online course, “The fox has many tricks, the hedgehog only one but it’s the best one of all.” Archilochus said that in six hundred something BC. Nobody’s sure what he meant by it but everyone has an opinion. 🙂

    Today is the same as yesterday and the sunset right now is glorious. I’m going out to watch.

    Enjoy the evening.

  5. Birgit's avatar Birgit Says:

    November 15, 2015 at 5:43 pm

    ‘Now we have the salad’, I ‘only understood railstation’ when you wrote about a “tough row to hoe” but ‘the Netherlands are not in distress’. Since you ‘put this flea into my ear’ and ‘I didn’t fell onto my head’ I just looked it up. I don’t have ‘tomatoes on my eyes’ and anyway, ‘only the hard/strong will come into the garden’.
    Big 50th birthday party yesterday and since ‘you don’t stand well on one leg’ ‘I had something in my tea’ and a ‘male cat’ and I was too ‘tired like a dog’ to comment. ‘Old Swede!’ Don’t worry, ‘everything in butter’ today.
    Rain and wind today but not very much so it didn’t ‘rain packthreads’ and no ‘cold draft like pike soup’ at home.
    I know, my English is ‘under all pig’ today und you must think that ‘I don’t have all cups in the cupboard’ or that ‘I have a bird’ or ‘one on the waffle’ but it’s ‘sausage to me’.
    Have a great day and ‘let the ape loose’!


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