#phrases — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #phrases, aggregated by home.social.
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“To coin a phrase”*…
Elliot Thornley nods to Shakespeare as the prodigious coiner of words (and phrases) that he was…
And then reminds us that Jeremy Bentham was no slouch with a neologism himself…
It’s pretty amazing. Shakespeare really shaped the English language!
So did Jeremy Bentham. He’s best-known for inventing utilitarianism and the panopticon [see here], but he also coined the words:
- Minimize
- International
- Percentage
- Pluralism
- Monetary
- Locating
- Marginalize
- Codify
- The prefix ‘self-’
- Maximize
- The prefix ‘post-’
- The prefix ‘infra-’
- Exhaustive
- Insurable
- Collaborator
- Alleviating
- Unaffordable
- Exclusionary
- Inexclusively
- Antagonising
- Deontology
- Disambiguation
- Eudemonic
- Evidentiary
- Characterizable
- Perusable
- Preferability
- Remediation
- Astuteness
- Uncalculating
- Uncoerced
- Unbridgeable
- Subvariety
You can find even more Bentham coinages at my source [lots more].
And as if all that weren’t enough, Bentham kind of invented jogging:
Bentham appears to have been a regular jogger—or, as he put it, ‘circumgyrater’. According to the journalist George Wheatley, who stayed with the eighty-one year-old Bentham in March 1831, before both breakfast and dinner Bentham would take ‘a few turns in the garden, which … he calls circumgyrating’, which Wheatley described as a ‘trotting or taking up a kind of trotting step’.
So not only are you quoting Bentham, you might be mimicking him too…
The second-greatest coiner of English words? “You are quoting Bentham.”
More coinage (and source of the image at the top): “Coined Words Acknowledged.”
* idiom
###
As we commend contrivers, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that another colossal coiner of phrases appeared: the Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies animated short “A Wild Hare”– the first “official” Bugs Bunny cartoon– premiered (though long-time readers will recall that Bugs [or at least, his prototype] made his inaugural screen appearance two years earlier). Directed by Tex Avery, “A Wild Hare” was nominated for an Academy Award.
#BugsBunny #Cartoon #culture #history #JeremyBentham #language #literature #phrases #Shakespeare #TexAvery #words -
“To coin a phrase”*…
Elliot Thornley nods to Shakespeare as the prodigious coiner of words (and phrases) that he was…
And then reminds us that Jeremy Bentham was no slouch with a neologism himself…
It’s pretty amazing. Shakespeare really shaped the English language!
So did Jeremy Bentham. He’s best-known for inventing utilitarianism and the panopticon [see here], but he also coined the words:
- Minimize
- International
- Percentage
- Pluralism
- Monetary
- Locating
- Marginalize
- Codify
- The prefix ‘self-’
- Maximize
- The prefix ‘post-’
- The prefix ‘infra-’
- Exhaustive
- Insurable
- Collaborator
- Alleviating
- Unaffordable
- Exclusionary
- Inexclusively
- Antagonising
- Deontology
- Disambiguation
- Eudemonic
- Evidentiary
- Characterizable
- Perusable
- Preferability
- Remediation
- Astuteness
- Uncalculating
- Uncoerced
- Unbridgeable
- Subvariety
You can find even more Bentham coinages at my source [lots more].
And as if all that weren’t enough, Bentham kind of invented jogging:
Bentham appears to have been a regular jogger—or, as he put it, ‘circumgyrater’. According to the journalist George Wheatley, who stayed with the eighty-one year-old Bentham in March 1831, before both breakfast and dinner Bentham would take ‘a few turns in the garden, which … he calls circumgyrating’, which Wheatley described as a ‘trotting or taking up a kind of trotting step’.
So not only are you quoting Bentham, you might be mimicking him too…
The second-greatest coiner of English words? “You are quoting Bentham.”
More coinage (and source of the image at the top): “Coined Words Acknowledged.”
* idiom
###
As we commend contrivers, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that another colossal coiner of phrases appeared: the Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies animated short “A Wild Hare”– the first “official” Bugs Bunny cartoon– premiered (though long-time readers will recall that Bugs [or at least, his prototype] made his inaugural screen appearance two years earlier). Directed by Tex Avery, “A Wild Hare” was nominated for an Academy Award.
#BugsBunny #Cartoon #culture #history #JeremyBentham #language #literature #phrases #Shakespeare #TexAvery #words -
🤔🧐🥸😎🤓💁♂️*If You Say 11 Phrases On A Regular Basis, Your Parents Did An Great Job Raising You👉
Your Parents Did A Great Job Raising You If You Say These 11 Phrases Often | YourTango
https://www.yourtango.com/family/parents-did-great-job-say-phrases-regular-basis -
English language is getting weird.
Everyone has their "daily driver" now. What's that?
In former times someone was "looking for a new job" now they seek their "next role".I am not a native speaker, so this may be the reason why I think it sounds weird. Or not?🤷
#english #language #phrases #dailydriver #newrole -
"I'll be back in 2 _______s of a ________'s _________."
Fill in yours.
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"I'll be back in 2 _______s of a ________'s _________."
Fill in yours.
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🧠🤯🧠🤯🧠🤯💁♀️*You Can Usually Tell How Intelligent A Person Is By 10 Phrases They Say When They're Stressed👉
People On The Verge Of Real Happiness Tend To Have These 8 Uncomfortable Feelings First | YourTango
https://www.yourtango.com/self/you-can-usually-tell-how-intelligent-person-is-by-phrases-they-say-when-theyre-stressed -
💊💉👩🏿⚕️👩🏼⚕️👨🏽⚕️👨⚕️👩🏿⚕️💊💉🏥⚕️🥼🩺🩻😷⛑️💁🏿♀️*3 Key Phrases to Get a Doctor to Take Your Symptoms Seriously — According to a Doctor👉
3 Phrases to Use at the Doctor’s Office to Avoid Being Dismissed
https://www.today.com/health/womens-health/phrases-to-get-doctor-take-pain-seriously-rcna344955 -
This is the moment of truth! :gutkato_kolereta:
After that, we can go back to lies and mystifications. :gutkato_dikfingro_supren:
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This is the moment of truth! :gutkato_kolereta:
After that, we can go back to lies and mystifications. :gutkato_dikfingro_supren:
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40+ Common expressions that became great song titles
Listed below are 40 common expressions that have become great song titles over the years. They are presented in alphabetical order. The songs shown date from 1955 to 2026. Feel free to pass along any others that you may know.
Peace!
“Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” – 1959 song by Dean Martin
“Ain’t That a Shame” – 1955 song by Fats Domino and in 1979 by Cheap Trick
“Another One Bites the Dust” – 1980 song by Queen
“Asking for a Friend” – 2025 song by Foo Fighters
“Back of My Hand” – 2025 song by Belair Lip Bombs and 2005 song by The Rolling Stones
“Beating Around the Bush” – 1977 song by AC/DC
“Can We Still Be Friends” – 1978 song by Todd Rundgren
“Come As You Are” – 1991 song by Nirvana
“Cry Me a River” – 1955 song recorded by multiple artists
“Fight Fire with Fire” – song by multiple artists including Metallica
“Get On the Ball” – 1992 song by No Doubt
“God Only Knows” – 1966 song by The Beach Boys
“Good Help Is So Hard to Find” – 2014 song by DCFC
“Hanging Out to Dry” – 2026 song by Florence Road
“Hit the Road Jack” – 1960 song by Ray Charles
“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” – 1966 song by Marvin Gaye
“If It Makes You Happy” – 1996 song by Sheryl Crow
“Keep Your Hands to Yourself” – 1987 song by the Georgia Satellites
“Let It All Hang Out” – 2009 song by Weezer
“Let the Good Times Roll” – 1978 song by The Cars
“Life in the Fast Lane” – 1976 song by The Eagles
“Listen to Your Heart” – 1988 song by Roxette
“One Way or Another” – 1979 song by Blondie
“Only the Good Die Young” – 1977 song by Billy Joel
“Point of No Return” – 1977 song by Kansas
“Race Against Time” – 1987 song by U2
“Same Old Song and Dance” – 1974 song by Aerosmith
“Should’ve Known Better” – 2026 song by the Beaches
“Takes One to Know One” – 2025 song by the Beaches
“The Best Is Yet to Come” – 1959 song by Frank Sinatra and Count Basie
“The First Cut Is the Deepest” – 1967 song by Cat Stevens, Sheryl Crow, and others
“Too Close for Comfort” – 1956 song by Sammy Davis, Jr.
“Too Much Time on My Hands” – 1981 song by Styx
“You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” – 1974 song by Bachman Turner Overdrive
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” – 1969 song by The Rolling Stones
“You Only Live Once” – 2006 song by The Strokes
“What Can I Say” – 2005 song by Brandi Carlile
“What Do I Know” – 2025 song by Deep Sea Diver
“Wish You Were Here” – 1975 song by Pink Floyd
“Working for the Weekend” – 1981 by Loverboy
“Wrapped Around Your Finger” – 1983 song by The Police
SOURCES:
- personal knowledge
- reddit.com
- http://www.google.com
- en.wikipedia.org
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40+ Common expressions that became great song titles
Listed below are 40 common expressions that have become great song titles over the years. They are presented in alphabetical order. The songs shown date from 1955 to 2026. Feel free to pass along any others that you may know.
Peace!
“Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” – 1959 song by Dean Martin
“Ain’t That a Shame” – 1955 song by Fats Domino and in 1979 by Cheap Trick
“Another One Bites the Dust” – 1980 song by Queen
“Asking for a Friend” – 2025 song by Foo Fighters
“Back of My Hand” – 2025 song by Belair Lip Bombs and 2005 song by The Rolling Stones
“Beating Around the Bush” – 1977 song by AC/DC
“Can We Still Be Friends” – 1978 song by Todd Rundgren
“Come As You Are” – 1991 song by Nirvana
“Cry Me a River” – 1955 song recorded by multiple artists
“Fight Fire with Fire” – song by multiple artists including Metallica
“Get On the Ball” – 1992 song by No Doubt
“God Only Knows” – 1966 song by The Beach Boys
“Good Help Is So Hard to Find” – 2014 song by DCFC
“Hanging Out to Dry” – 2026 song by Florence Road
“Hit the Road Jack” – 1960 song by Ray Charles
“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” – 1967 song by Gladys Knight and the Pips and 1968 release by Marvin Gaye
“If It Makes You Happy” – 1996 song by Sheryl Crow
“Keep Your Hands to Yourself” – 1987 song by the Georgia Satellites
“Let It All Hang Out” – 2009 song by Weezer
“Let the Good Times Roll” – 1978 song by The Cars
“Life in the Fast Lane” – 1976 song by The Eagles
“Listen to Your Heart” – 1988 song by Roxette
“One Way or Another” – 1979 song by Blondie
“Only the Good Die Young” – 1978 song by Billy Joel
“Point of No Return” – 1977 song by Kansas
“Race Against Time” – 1987 song by U2
“Same Old Song and Dance” – 1974 song by Aerosmith
“Should’ve Known Better” – 2026 song by the Beaches
“Takes One to Know One” – 2025 song by the Beaches
“The Best Is Yet to Come” – 1959 song by Frank Sinatra and Count Basie
“The First Cut Is the Deepest” – 1967 song by Cat Stevens, Sheryl Crow, and others
“Too Close for Comfort” – 1956 song by Sammy Davis, Jr.
“Too Much Time on My Hands” – 1981 song by Styx
“You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” – 1974 song by Bachman Turner Overdrive
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” – 1969 song by The Rolling Stones
“You Only Live Once” – 2006 song by The Strokes
“What Can I Say” – 2005 song by Brandi Carlile
“What Do I Know” – 2025 song by Deep Sea Diver
“Wish You Were Here” – 1975 song by Pink Floyd
“Working for the Weekend” – 1981 by Loverboy
“Wrapped Around Your Finger” – 1983 song by The Police
SOURCES:
- personal knowledge
- reddit.com
- http://www.google.com
- en.wikipedia.org
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Love yourself
Something that is quite obvious to me was quoted by a Master of Corporal skills
Do not ever speak negatively about yourself, not even as a joke.
Your corpus does not differentiate between jokes and truth on this energetic level.Words emit energy and they do eminate spells. The skill of seperating words in elements is called spelling for a good reasons!
Change the way you speak about yourself and you shall change your life.
#Words #of #wisdom #WordsOfWisdom #Motivation #motivational #phrases
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Love yourself
Something that is quite obvious to me was quoted by a Master of Corporal skills
Do not ever speak negatively about yourself, not even as a joke.
Your corpus does not differentiate between jokes and truth on this energetic level.Words emit energy and they do eminate spells. The skill of seperating words in elements is called spelling for a good reasons!
Change the way you speak about yourself and you shall change your life.
#Words #of #wisdom #WordsOfWisdom #Motivation #motivational #phrases
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Fun to see the Irish idiom "make a hames of" in a national news headline: https://www.rte.ie/news/2026/0417/1568809-odonovan-protests/
I wrote about the expression in 2012: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/making-a-hames-of-it/
#language #IrishEnglish #dialect #idioms #phrases #words #blogpost
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Fun to see the Irish idiom "make a hames of" in a national news headline: https://www.rte.ie/news/2026/0417/1568809-odonovan-protests/
I wrote about the expression in 2012: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/making-a-hames-of-it/
#language #IrishEnglish #dialect #idioms #phrases #words #blogpost
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Oh, I think I just realised what people mean when they say ‘have your cake and eat it too’. :gutkato_surprizita:
They probably mean eating your cake and having your (uneaten) cake in your possession, both at once, which is impossible. :gutkato_datreveno:
To me it always sounded like you get a cake and then you eat it, which is much less impossible. I mean, if you have a cake, then you are most likely going to eat it, and if you are eating cake, then of course you need to have cake. You could give someone cake and not let them eat it, but why would you do that? Who does that?! Really, the phrasing is just needlessly confusing! :gutkato_kapturniĝas:
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Oh, I think I just realised what people mean when they say ‘have your cake and eat it too’. :gutkato_surprizita:
They probably mean eating your cake and having your (uneaten) cake in your possession, both at once, which is impossible. :gutkato_datreveno:
To me it always sounded like you get a cake and then you eat it, which is much less impossible. I mean, if you have a cake, then you are most likely going to eat it, and if you are eating cake, then of course you need to have cake. You could give someone cake and not let them eat it, but why would you do that? Who does that?! Really, the phrasing is just needlessly confusing! :gutkato_kapturniĝas:
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Saw this sentence with both the Irish English "give out" and a standardized-English "give out":
"The banks often give out¹ that the rules are too tight and they can’t give out² the money people need."
¹ complain
² issue, distributeSource and commentary: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/giving-out-irish-style/
#language #dialect #idioms #IrishEnglish #EnglishUsage #phrases
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Saw this sentence with both the Irish English "give out" and a standardized-English "give out":
"The banks often give out¹ that the rules are too tight and they can’t give out² the money people need."
¹ complain
² issue, distributeSource and commentary: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/giving-out-irish-style/
#language #dialect #idioms #IrishEnglish #EnglishUsage #phrases
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"Platty joobs", "genny lec", "menty b" & co.: I wrote about this British slang fad
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2026/02/10/dont-have-a-menty-b-about-this-bloggy-p/#slang #language #words #phrases #hun #linguistics #wordplay
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"Platty joobs", "genny lec", "menty b" & co.: I wrote about this British slang fad
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2026/02/10/dont-have-a-menty-b-about-this-bloggy-p/#slang #language #words #phrases #hun #linguistics #wordplay
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Don’t have a menty b about this bloggy p
An open linguistic question was raised recently on Bluesky by Darach Ó Séaghdha: What do we call those cutesie slang phrases that have become productive in the UK lately, like genny lec for ‘general election’ and menty b for ‘mental breakdown’?
In response I wrote a short thread, which I already disagree with. So I’ll pick up the discussion here on Sentence first, where there’s more room, it’s easier to find, and it’s probably less ephemeral than on social media.
We can show this linguistic fad as having two main stereotyped patterns or formulas, which overlap morphologically. For type 1, we take a word or short phrase, clip (i.e., truncate, abbreviate) the first stressed syllable, add a y-suffix, and reduce the next word or stressed syllable to its initial letter:
mental breakdown → menty b
nervous breakdown → nervy b
a hundred percent → hundy p
tomato ketchup → tommy k
sauvignon blanc → savvy b
ChatGPT → chatty g
lockdown → locky d
pandemic → panny d
Clapham Junction → Clappy JFor type 2, we clip the first stressed syllable, add a y-suffix (same as type 1 so far), clip the next word or stressed syllable, and, optionally, add an s-suffix:
general election → genny lec/lex
cost of living / cost-of-living crisis → cozzy/cozzie livs
platinum jubilee → platty jubes/joobs
king’s coronation → corrie nash
bank holiday → banny hols
state funeral → statey funesYou may not have seen or heard any of these. They’re still fairly restricted demographically, and are perhaps more spoken than written – and written only in very informal contexts – but if you search for them you’ll find examples.
I’m sure a linguist could formulate them better, but you get the idea. There’s minor variation, but there are clear core patterns. And a phrase can sometimes fit either type: panny dems and platty j also work and indeed are in use. How fun or satisfying they are to say is likely also a factor.
When a phrase can’t go either way, it may be because the result is semantically opaque or ambiguous, e.g., menty breaks suggests mental break(s) more than mental breakdown. Type 1s seem not to favour initial letters with zero onset (i.e., starting with a vowel sound): no cozzy ells or statey effs. But the sample size is small, so that may not hold up.
‘Have you heard the phrase “genny lec”?’ BBC vox pop, 2 July 2024
So what exactly is this phenomenon?
It’s slang and wordplay, for starters – but of a specific kind. The repeated formula (multiple clipping + y– or s-suffixation) made me wonder at first if it’s a snowclone – a kind of phrasal template that’s customizable for reuse (X is the new Y; X 2.0). But a snowclone needs to be a cliché first, and that’s not the case here.
The formula is productive, though – you can coin these phrases at will, as @matthewcba does in a TikTok video with the comically improbable mitty circs ‘mitigating circumstances’. (The video also includes simple clippings like Ab Fab and profesh.)
In the UK Independent in August 2024, Madeline Sherratt referred to the pattern as ‘cringe lingua’ and cited slang expert Tony Thorne’s belief that it
derives from the online “hun” generation – a subculture lampooned on Mumsnet that runs rampant with the frivolous and facetious use of “gorg” and “mwah” when typing furiously on WhatsApp – an etymological by-product of the “live, laugh, love” philosophy.
It extends to the humble “jackie p” (jacket potato) with a squirt of “tommy k” (tomato ketchup) on top – a money-saving meal when everything is so “spenny” (expensive) . . .
Such phrases are attributed to this broadly millennial subculture, which involves making silly jokes online. Those who subscribe to it, Thorne says, tend to be white, young, and upper-working-class to lower-middle-class women.
He said: “The online phrases such as ‘platty jubes’ and ‘savvy b’ mock the formal language that oppresses us, and we see this with young people when they move into the world of work and professionalism.”
Hun culture is something I was only marginally aware of. But I’m not surprised the fashion is driven by young women, given their place at the vanguard of so much linguistic innovation. The examples I’ve listed are all relatively new, as far as I know, but there are plenty of forerunners from various domains, including personal names.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was popularly known as Jackie O. Mickey D’s (Maccy D’s, etc.) for McDonald’s emerged in the 1970s as US Black and campus slang. An Aussie was reported on Bluesky to have called Christmas decorations ‘Chrissie Decs’ in the 1990s. Sunny Delight rebranded as SunnyD decades ago. Okey-doke has been dated to the 1930s. I’m sure you can think of others.
The recent wave of phrases are from a particular, interrelated set of sources, say the linguists who’ve researched them. Christian Ilbury confirmed to me that some are from or are associated with hun culture in the UK; his 2022 paper ‘U Ok Hun?: The digital commodification of white woman style’ includes examples of the type discussed here, including cocky t’s ‘cocktails’.
Pavel Iosad told me that his colleague Patrick Honeybone
has studied a version of pattern 2 in Liverpool (truncation + y-suffixation + some segmental effects, eg Sefton Park > Sevvy) and he dubbed it (Scouse) diddification, which I think is a glorious name that we should adopt.
Honeybone also refers to the process as ‘diddificating truncation’, alluding again to P. Diddy, and provides a one-page summary here. At first I thought another rapper, Cardi B, fitted the pattern, but that name is a reworking of Bacardi.
The UK may be the hotspot of this slang, but Australians, as we’ve seen, are also on board. They do love their clippings and hypocorisms. Cozzie livs was Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year in 2023, and I recently saw an Australian call the tennis player Elena Rybakina ‘Lenny Baks’, a great example that shows the name’s stress pattern.
Some people find these phrases twee, stupid, or insensitive. Even the Financial Times said that cozzie livs ‘only compounds the misery’ of the cost-of-living crisis. Some of the phrases may aim, in part, to make light of difficult or stressful subjects, to dull or reclaim their power. This is a specialty of slang. But they won’t win everyone over, and that, too, is as it should be.
In January 2023, Serena Smith’s ‘investy g’ for Dazed magazine tied them to a literary tradition of creative silliness, citing Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Sincere use of these phrases ‘misses a crucial element’, she wrote; ‘the cringiness, the tackiness, the ridiculousness is part of the fun’.
I neither love nor loathe them. I’d never used them, even ironically, until this blog post, this bloggy p, but I find them interesting as wordplay. I’d love to hear ideas for what to call them, how else they might be categorized, or how they relate to patterns already formally described or informally conceived (e.g., as a subset of hun lingo).
Suggestions in the replies to Gretchen McCulloch’s post on Bluesky include childish abbreviations or chilly abs, nicky Ns or nicky ens (for ‘nicknames’), clippy comps, and extended hypocoristics. Of these I like Erik Wennstrom’s clippy comps best. A clipped compound could be psyops or sitcom, but clippy comps shows more precisely (because self-referentially) what it refers to. Clippy c’s could be used for type 1.
Another route is to use a popular or prototypical example to refer synecdochically to the set, much as Brianne Hughes uses cutthroats or cutthroat compounds as shorthand for agentive and instrumental exocentric verb-noun (V-N) compounds. This would give us menty b compounds, genny lec phrases, or some such term.
Don’t have a nervy b about it, but if the slang sticks around and there’s a good term for it, it might eventually end up in an esteemed dictionary like Merry Dubs or the Oxy D.
A viral tweet in January 2023 from Depop Drama, now DM Drama, that helped popularize “cozzie livs”.
#affixation #BritishSlang #clippings #cozzieLivs #etymology #gennyLec #gennyLex #humour #hun #hunCulture #hypocorisms #language #linguistics #mentyB #phrases #plattyJoobs #slang #wordplay -
Don’t have a menty b about this bloggy p
An open linguistic question was raised recently on Bluesky by Darach Ó Séaghdha: What do we call those cutesie slang phrases that have become productive in the UK lately, like genny lec for ‘general election’ and menty b for ‘mental breakdown’?
In response I wrote a short thread, which I already disagree with. So I’ll pick up the discussion here on Sentence first, where there’s more room, it’s easier to find, and it’s probably less ephemeral than on social media.
We can show this linguistic fad as having two main stereotyped patterns or formulas, which overlap morphologically. For type 1, we take a word or short phrase, clip (i.e., truncate, abbreviate) the first stressed syllable, add a y-suffix, and reduce the next word or stressed syllable to its initial letter:
mental breakdown → menty b
nervous breakdown → nervy b
a hundred percent → hundy p
tomato ketchup → tommy k
sauvignon blanc → savvy b
ChatGPT → chatty g
lockdown → locky d
pandemic → panny d
Clapham Junction → Clappy JFor type 2, we clip the first stressed syllable, add a y-suffix (same as type 1 so far), clip the next word or stressed syllable, and, optionally, add an s-suffix:
general election → genny lec/lex
cost of living / cost-of-living crisis → cozzy/cozzie livs
platinum jubilee → platty jubes/joobs
king’s coronation → corrie nash
bank holiday → banny hols
state funeral → statey funesYou may not have seen or heard any of these. They’re still fairly restricted demographically, and are perhaps more spoken than written – and written only in very informal contexts – but if you search for them you’ll find examples.
I’m sure a linguist could formulate them better, but you get the idea. There’s minor variation, but there are clear core patterns. And a phrase can sometimes fit either type: panny dems and platty j also work and indeed are in use. How fun or satisfying they are to say is likely also a factor.
When a phrase can’t go either way, it may be because the result is semantically opaque or ambiguous, e.g., menty breaks suggests mental break(s) more than mental breakdown. Type 1s seem not to favour initial letters with zero onset (i.e., starting with a vowel sound): no cozzy ells or statey effs. But the sample size is small, so that may not hold up.
‘Have you heard the phrase “genny lec”?’ BBC vox pop, 2 July 2024
So what exactly is this phenomenon?
It’s slang and wordplay, for starters – but of a specific kind. The repeated formula (multiple clipping + y– or s-suffixation) made me wonder at first if it’s a snowclone – a kind of phrasal template that’s customizable for reuse (X is the new Y; X 2.0). But a snowclone needs to be a cliché first, and that’s not the case here.
The formula is productive, though – you can coin these phrases at will, as @matthewcba does in a TikTok video with the comically improbable mitty circs ‘mitigating circumstances’. (The video also includes simple clippings like Ab Fab and profesh.)
In the UK Independent in August 2024, Madeline Sherratt referred to the pattern as ‘cringe lingua’ and cited slang expert Tony Thorne’s belief that it
derives from the online “hun” generation – a subculture lampooned on Mumsnet that runs rampant with the frivolous and facetious use of “gorg” and “mwah” when typing furiously on WhatsApp – an etymological by-product of the “live, laugh, love” philosophy.
It extends to the humble “jackie p” (jacket potato) with a squirt of “tommy k” (tomato ketchup) on top – a money-saving meal when everything is so “spenny” (expensive) . . .
Such phrases are attributed to this broadly millennial subculture, which involves making silly jokes online. Those who subscribe to it, Thorne says, tend to be white, young, and upper-working-class to lower-middle-class women.
He said: “The online phrases such as ‘platty jubes’ and ‘savvy b’ mock the formal language that oppresses us, and we see this with young people when they move into the world of work and professionalism.”
Hun culture is something I was only marginally aware of. But I’m not surprised the fashion is driven by young women, given their place at the vanguard of so much linguistic innovation. The examples I’ve listed are all relatively new, as far as I know, but there are plenty of forerunners from various domains, including personal names.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was popularly known as Jackie O. Mickey D’s (Maccy D’s, etc.) for McDonald’s emerged in the 1970s as US Black and campus slang. An Aussie was reported on Bluesky to have called Christmas decorations ‘Chrissie Decs’ in the 1990s. Sunny Delight rebranded as SunnyD decades ago. Okey-doke has been dated to the 1930s. I’m sure you can think of others.
The recent wave of phrases are from a particular, interrelated set of sources, say the linguists who’ve researched them. Christian Ilbury confirmed to me that some are from or are associated with hun culture in the UK; his 2022 paper ‘U Ok Hun?: The digital commodification of white woman style’ includes examples of the type discussed here, including cocky t’s ‘cocktails’.
Pavel Iosad told me that his colleague Patrick Honeybone
has studied a version of pattern 2 in Liverpool (truncation + y-suffixation + some segmental effects, eg Sefton Park > Sevvy) and he dubbed it (Scouse) diddification, which I think is a glorious name that we should adopt.
Honeybone also refers to the process as ‘diddificating truncation’, alluding again to P. Diddy, and provides a one-page summary here. At first I thought another rapper, Cardi B, fitted the pattern, but that name is a reworking of Bacardi.
The UK may be the hotspot of this slang, but Australians, as we’ve seen, are also on board. They do love their clippings and hypocorisms. Cozzie livs was Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year in 2023, and I recently saw an Australian call the tennis player Elena Rybakina ‘Lenny Baks’, a great example that shows the name’s stress pattern.
Some people find these phrases twee, stupid, or insensitive. Even the Financial Times said that cozzie livs ‘only compounds the misery’ of the cost-of-living crisis. Some of the phrases may aim, in part, to make light of difficult or stressful subjects, to dull or reclaim their power. This is a specialty of slang. But they won’t win everyone over, and that, too, is as it should be.
In January 2023, Serena Smith’s ‘investy g’ for Dazed magazine tied them to a literary tradition of creative silliness, citing Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Sincere use of these phrases ‘misses a crucial element’, she wrote; ‘the cringiness, the tackiness, the ridiculousness is part of the fun’.
I neither love nor loathe them. I’d never used them, even ironically, until this blog post, this bloggy p, but I find them interesting as wordplay. I’d love to hear ideas for what to call them, how else they might be categorized, or how they relate to patterns already formally described or informally conceived (e.g., as a subset of hun lingo).
Suggestions in the replies to Gretchen McCulloch’s post on Bluesky include childish abbreviations or chilly abs, nicky Ns or nicky ens (for ‘nicknames’), clippy comps, and extended hypocoristics. Of these I like Erik Wennstrom’s clippy comps best. A clipped compound could be psyops or sitcom, but clippy comps shows more precisely (because self-referentially) what it refers to. Clippy c’s could be used for type 1.
Another route is to use a popular or prototypical example to refer synecdochically to the set, much as Brianne Hughes uses cutthroats or cutthroat compounds as shorthand for agentive and instrumental exocentric verb-noun (V-N) compounds. This would give us menty b compounds, genny lec phrases, or some such term.
Don’t have a nervy b about it, but if the slang sticks around and there’s a good term for it, it might eventually end up in an esteemed dictionary like Merry Dubs or the Oxy D.
A viral tweet in January 2023 from Depop Drama, now DM Drama, that helped popularize “cozzie livs”.
#affixation #BritishSlang #clippings #cozzieLivs #etymology #gennyLec #gennyLex #humour #hun #hunCulture #hypocorisms #language #linguistics #mentyB #phrases #plattyJoobs #slang #wordplay -
Australian Shepherd shows incredible smarts using 'talk buttons' to warn family of disaster
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/dog-talking-buttons-ex1
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Australian Shepherd shows incredible smarts using 'talk buttons' to warn family of disaster
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/dog-talking-buttons-ex1
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Another freaking f-word
I never fully adopted freaking as an intensifier, euphemistic for fucking, partly because I swear fairly freely, and maybe also because fecking was available in my Irish English dialect. But I like having freaking available, and with its hundredth birthday round the corner, it’s a good time to showcase it.1
Freaking substitutes for its ruder cousin in all sorts of lexical and syntactic contexts, modifying adjectives (that was freaking amazing), verbs (let’s freaking go), and nouns (how is it still freaking January?), among other word classes; it’s also used as an infix (un-freaking-real) and in set phrases like freakin’ A – euphemistic, obviously, for fucking A.
From “Be-bop-a-Lisa” in Simpsons Comics no. 6 (1994). Script & pencils: Bill Morrison; Inks: Tim Bavington; Colours: Cindy Vance. Editor: Steve VanceOrigins and use
The earliest known use of this freaking – the first citation in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, and the OED – is in the 1928 novel Georgie May, where author Maxwell Bodenheim uses two freakings and a freakin’, including:
“Gawd, ah hate the hull, freaking pack uh you,” she cried, between her sobbing.
The next example those dictionaries list is in Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949):
“You point that freakin’ finger at me ’n you’re one dead pointer.”
That 21-year gap doesn’t mean no one was using it in the meantime. I found the line “You freaking fool!” in the 1937 screwball comedy Nothing Sacred, available on YouTube and the Internet Archive at around the 47m 40s mark:
Films and TV, with their heightened emotions and industrious regulators, are a natural home for this expressive but family-friendly expletive. A chart from COCA shows its use concentrated in those media, occurring at over four times the rate in fiction generally and over six times the rate in speech:2
Frequency of “freaking” in different genres. Graph from COCA.As Wiktionary notes, “Freaking (or fricking) is often used in motion pictures as a substitute for fucking so that characters can be shown to swear without the motion picture incurring censorship or a higher certificate than it otherwise might.”
Less discerningly, the Encyclopædia Britannica says freaking is “used to make an angry statement more forceful”. That’s not wrong, but it’s misleadingly narrow: freaking can amplify all sorts of emotions, even joy – ask Ned Flanders.
WikiHow knows this. An article by Wits End Parenting and Elaine Heredia says you can use freaking “to emphasize how great something or someone is” and that it “can be a positive or negative word based on context”. It adds that the word “isn’t a sin to say”, in case you were wondering.
Data
Freaking is on the rise but has been levelling off, according to data in COCA and Google’s Ngram Viewer. Rows under the dates below show frequency (i.e., number of uses), number of million words in the sample, and (hence, by division) per-million figures for direct comparison:
Frequency of “freaking” in five-year segments from 1990 to 2019.That levelling off is despite global use. Geographically, freaking is most popular not in the US but in Singapore, per the GloWbE corpus (freakin has the same top two, reversed). Malaysia comes in third, followed by Canada, Australia, and the Philippines:
Frequency of “freaking” in 20 countries where English is spoken (GloWbE, 2012–2013).Jack Grieve’s eye-catching swear maps of the USA, meanwhile, allow us to zoom in on what States are especially partial to freaking and freakin. Californians’ relative coolness towards them came as a surprise:
Browsing the word’s collocates (freaking/freakin’ ___) in COCA shows the company it keeps. High-ranking +1s include the adjectives awesome, amazing, hilarious, crazy, cool, hot, stupid, hard, and huge; nouns like idiot, mind, thing, break, genius, clue, and deal; and occasional verbs, like love, hate, kidding, and kill.
Some of these invite us to extrapolate the full phrases, or chunks: big freaking deal; give me a freakin’ break; not have a freaking clue; out of my/your/etc. freaking mind; Are you freakin’ kidding?
Other language corpora, such as the 14-billion-word iWeb, show a similar pattern of collocations:
Easily topping the +1s are the preposition out and the pronoun me: a sign of how well freaking [me] out caught on as an idiom, with multiple senses, after being coined in the 1960s. That’s a different usage, of course: not the intensifier freaking but the verb freak (or rather the verb phrase freak out) in the present progressive tense.
This album is the OED’s first citation for intransitive “freak out” in the sense “renounce societal norms, esp. by embracing pacifism, rejecting conservative values, and adopting a nonconformist appearance”.Pragmatics
Zappa fits right in here: freaking offers outsider energy for any self-defined freak (or geek) who cares to use it.3 The word’s gently countercultural flavour is also apparent in dictionary citations, where Tom Wolfe’s name recurs.
What makes freaking effective as a minced oath, and attractive to mild and novice swearers, is that it offers proximity to (and thus evocation of) strong swearing while remaining relatively benign. We see this niche exploited expertly by a child in the vampire comic 30 Days of Night: Return to Barrow:
Comic written by Steve Niles and drawn by Ben TemplesmithA little later the boy defaults to freakin’, this time automatically obeying his father’s no-swearing rule, and making the word more casual by dropping the g:
Freaking is not always a straightforward substitute for fucking, however. The particular way that it lands caused slight consternation for slang expert Michael Adams when his son started using it at the age of seven:
. . . he’s not just saying That’s freakin’ cool or No freakin’ way. No, he’s saying things like What the freak?! which is a long way from Oh, my gosh on the euphemism scale. There’s the underlying profanity. There’s the phonetics. There’s the fact — apparently — that What the hell? and What the freak? — while parallel — signify differently.4
Films redubbed for TV broadcast have mixed fortunes with it, as my post “Freak those monkey-fightin’ melon farmers!” shows. “I don’t need full freakin’ forensics” in Die Hard 2 (1990) is passable, if implausible in a police station, while “Freak you!” in Casino (1995) is comically underpowered.
In his 2016 book In Praise of Profanity (which I reviewed here and recommend), Michael Adams discusses how the vowels, consonants, and pragmatics of various “partial euphemisms” for fuck – feck, frak, frick, frig, and their freaky fraternity – do their work:
. . . although people usually think euphemisms work because they substitute for profanity, in fact many euphemisms are themselves partially profane, because they more or less cover up profanities—usually less—that are still inscribed in the situations of their use, and our minds’ eyes see through them to the profanities . . . . what makes profanity and the relevant euphemisms pragmatically powerful and interesting is that the euphemisms are often both euphemisms and profanity, a fact not unknown in linguistic circles but too often overlooked when we calculate the logic of language attitudes.
We’re advocates of strong language here at Strong Language, but we know it’s not suitable for all occasions: sometimes a softball is called for. And among the many euphemisms for fucking, freaking has, in a century or so of use, established itself as a truly effective and useful option. It may be mild, but it’s got freakin’ game.
Tyrese Gibson in Fast Five (2011)*
1 The OED also lists an obsolete, mid-17thC sense of freaking (adj.): “Of a person: inclined to change his or her mind, mood, or behaviour suddenly and unaccountably; given to freakish ideas; capricious, fickle, whimsical.” One of its fans was Samuel freakin’ Pepys: “He told me what a mad freaking fellow Sir Ellis Layton hath been” (Diary, 25 January, 1665).
2 I was unable to separate the verb freaking from the intensifier using part-of-speech tags in COCA, GloWbE, and iWeb, so these uses are combined in the graphs. To fortify the data somewhat I checked 300 examples in each corpus and found that, in COCA, 76% were the intensifier and 24% were the verb (freaking out, or plain freaking with the same sense); in GloWbE it was 74% and 26%, and in iWeb 68% and 32%. So you can consider the graphs broadly indicative but with that significant caveat.
3 We still don’t know where freak came from: origin unknown, the dictionaries say, though the OED offers speculation. Skeat says freak in the sense “whim” is of Germanic origin, being frec “bold, rash” in Old English.
4 Adams has also analyzed the use of freaking in the TV series 13 Reasons Why, tracing a character’s graduation from euphemistic to full-bore profanity.
#censorship #comics #corpusLinguistics #euphemisms #expletiveInfixation #freakOut #freaking #fuck #fucking #infixation #intensifiers #mincedOaths #phrases #popCulture #slang #swearing
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Another freaking f-word
I never fully adopted freaking as an intensifier, euphemistic for fucking, partly because I swear fairly freely, and maybe also because fecking was available in my Irish English dialect. But I like having freaking available, and with its hundredth birthday round the corner, it’s a good time to showcase it.1
Freaking substitutes for its ruder cousin in all sorts of lexical and syntactic contexts, modifying adjectives (that was freaking amazing), verbs (let’s freaking go), and nouns (how is it still freaking January?), among other word classes; it’s also used as an infix (un-freaking-real) and in set phrases like freakin’ A – euphemistic, obviously, for fucking A.
From “Be-bop-a-Lisa” in Simpsons Comics no. 6 (1994). Script & pencils: Bill Morrison; Inks: Tim Bavington; Colours: Cindy Vance. Editor: Steve VanceOrigins and use
The earliest known use of this freaking – the first citation in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, and the OED – is in the 1928 novel Georgie May, where author Maxwell Bodenheim uses two freakings and a freakin’, including:
“Gawd, ah hate the hull, freaking pack uh you,” she cried, between her sobbing.
The next example those dictionaries list is in Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949):
“You point that freakin’ finger at me ’n you’re one dead pointer.”
That 21-year gap doesn’t mean no one was using it in the meantime. I found the line “You freaking fool!” in the 1937 screwball comedy Nothing Sacred, available on YouTube and the Internet Archive at around the 47m 40s mark:
Films and TV, with their heightened emotions and industrious regulators, are a natural home for this expressive but family-friendly expletive. A chart from COCA shows its use concentrated in those media, occurring at over four times the rate in fiction generally and over six times the rate in speech:2
Frequency of “freaking” in different genres. Graph from COCA.As Wiktionary notes, “Freaking (or fricking) is often used in motion pictures as a substitute for fucking so that characters can be shown to swear without the motion picture incurring censorship or a higher certificate than it otherwise might.”
Less discerningly, the Encyclopædia Britannica says freaking is “used to make an angry statement more forceful”. That’s not wrong, but it’s misleadingly narrow: freaking can amplify all sorts of emotions, even joy – ask Ned Flanders.
WikiHow knows this. An article by Wits End Parenting and Elaine Heredia says you can use freaking “to emphasize how great something or someone is” and that it “can be a positive or negative word based on context”. It adds that the word “isn’t a sin to say”, in case you were wondering.
Data
Freaking is on the rise but has been levelling off, according to data in COCA and Google’s Ngram Viewer. Rows under the dates below show frequency (i.e., number of uses), number of million words in the sample, and (hence, by division) per-million figures for direct comparison:
Frequency of “freaking” in five-year segments from 1990 to 2019.That levelling off is despite global use. Geographically, freaking is most popular not in the US but in Singapore, per the GloWbE corpus (freakin has the same top two, reversed). Malaysia comes in third, followed by Canada, Australia, and the Philippines:
Frequency of “freaking” in 20 countries where English is spoken (GloWbE, 2012–2013).Jack Grieve’s eye-catching swear maps of the USA, meanwhile, allow us to zoom in on what States are especially partial to freaking and freakin. Californians’ relative coolness towards them came as a surprise:
Browsing the word’s collocates (freaking/freakin’ ___) in COCA shows the company it keeps. High-ranking +1s include the adjectives awesome, amazing, hilarious, crazy, cool, hot, stupid, hard, and huge; nouns like idiot, mind, thing, break, genius, clue, and deal; and occasional verbs, like love, hate, kidding, and kill.
Some of these invite us to extrapolate the full phrases, or chunks: big freaking deal; give me a freakin’ break; not have a freaking clue; out of my/your/etc. freaking mind; Are you freakin’ kidding?
Other language corpora, such as the 14-billion-word iWeb, show a similar pattern of collocations:
Easily topping the +1s are the preposition out and the pronoun me: a sign of how well freaking [me] out caught on as an idiom, with multiple senses, after being coined in the 1960s. That’s a different usage, of course: not the intensifier freaking but the verb freak (or rather the verb phrase freak out) in the present progressive tense.
This album is the OED’s first citation for intransitive “freak out” in the sense “renounce societal norms, esp. by embracing pacifism, rejecting conservative values, and adopting a nonconformist appearance”.Pragmatics
Zappa fits right in here: freaking offers outsider energy for any self-defined freak (or geek) who cares to use it.3 The word’s gently countercultural flavour is also apparent in dictionary citations, where Tom Wolfe’s name recurs.
What makes freaking effective as a minced oath, and attractive to mild and novice swearers, is that it offers proximity to (and thus evocation of) strong swearing while remaining relatively benign. We see this niche exploited expertly by a child in the vampire comic 30 Days of Night: Return to Barrow:
Comic written by Steve Niles and drawn by Ben TemplesmithA little later the boy defaults to freakin’, this time automatically obeying his father’s no-swearing rule, and making the word more casual by dropping the g:
Freaking is not always a straightforward substitute for fucking, however. The particular way that it lands caused slight consternation for slang expert Michael Adams when his son started using it at the age of seven:
. . . he’s not just saying That’s freakin’ cool or No freakin’ way. No, he’s saying things like What the freak?! which is a long way from Oh, my gosh on the euphemism scale. There’s the underlying profanity. There’s the phonetics. There’s the fact — apparently — that What the hell? and What the freak? — while parallel — signify differently.4
Films redubbed for TV broadcast have mixed fortunes with it, as my post “Freak those monkey-fightin’ melon farmers!” shows. “I don’t need full freakin’ forensics” in Die Hard 2 (1990) is passable, if implausible in a police station, while “Freak you!” in Casino (1995) is comically underpowered.
In his 2016 book In Praise of Profanity (which I reviewed here and recommend), Michael Adams discusses how the vowels, consonants, and pragmatics of various “partial euphemisms” for fuck – feck, frak, frick, frig, and their freaky fraternity – do their work:
. . . although people usually think euphemisms work because they substitute for profanity, in fact many euphemisms are themselves partially profane, because they more or less cover up profanities—usually less—that are still inscribed in the situations of their use, and our minds’ eyes see through them to the profanities . . . . what makes profanity and the relevant euphemisms pragmatically powerful and interesting is that the euphemisms are often both euphemisms and profanity, a fact not unknown in linguistic circles but too often overlooked when we calculate the logic of language attitudes.
We’re advocates of strong language here at Strong Language, but we know it’s not suitable for all occasions: sometimes a softball is called for. And among the many euphemisms for fucking, freaking has, in a century or so of use, established itself as a truly effective and useful option. It may be mild, but it’s got freakin’ game.
Tyrese Gibson in Fast Five (2011)*
1 The OED also lists an obsolete, mid-17thC sense of freaking (adj.): “Of a person: inclined to change his or her mind, mood, or behaviour suddenly and unaccountably; given to freakish ideas; capricious, fickle, whimsical.” One of its fans was Samuel freakin’ Pepys: “He told me what a mad freaking fellow Sir Ellis Layton hath been” (Diary, 25 January, 1665).
2 I was unable to separate the verb freaking from the intensifier using part-of-speech tags in COCA, GloWbE, and iWeb, so these uses are combined in the graphs. To fortify the data somewhat I checked 300 examples in each corpus and found that, in COCA, 76% were the intensifier and 24% were the verb (freaking out, or plain freaking with the same sense); in GloWbE it was 74% and 26%, and in iWeb 68% and 32%. So you can consider the graphs broadly indicative but with that significant caveat.
3 We still don’t know where freak came from: origin unknown, the dictionaries say, though the OED offers speculation. Skeat says freak in the sense “whim” is of Germanic origin, being frec “bold, rash” in Old English.
4 Adams has also analyzed the use of freaking in the TV series 13 Reasons Why, tracing a character’s graduation from euphemistic to full-bore profanity.
#censorship #comics #corpusLinguistics #euphemisms #expletiveInfixation #freakOut #freaking #fuck #fucking #infixation #intensifiers #mincedOaths #phrases #popCulture #slang #swearing
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Often language has similar words or similar sounding words that people speak with incorrectly without really knowing or realizing it's misleading or not quite right.
There is a more specific words and less misleading versions of #words or #phrases...
➡️ For example "Common sense"
...might mean "Common principles""Sense" is similar to "principles" but importantly principles can be more specific or measured way of saying / doing things so a list everyone can see is more agreeable, rather than your own version of "sense" which might be differently measured than list of "principles".
Since EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT and naturally they have different personality, it's better to measure it a bit more clearly which a list of principles in the middle which can help indicate agreement or debate things with less #ambiguity.
➡️ Another example
(quick-fast / maybe not perfect)💜 Love for others is perhaps top of the #list of #commandments for Jesus ✝️ and his principles - so clears up a lot of confusion between #Christian people or #Christianity or #Religion #debate - presenting a |Yes| or |No| simple question
We all need need to debate what loving people or looking after them means perhaps after that, but can assume better and not guess too not far off than even more general / unspecific words.
So if #love is top 5 on your list then a debate "Common sense" or "Common principles" about Jesus or something can be quickly agreed / answered rather than something #ambiguous.
#Lists are always good.
#CommonSense #List of #Principles
= #Answer for #Ambiguous #words or #phrases in #Debate -
Fun example of semantic drift, but is it restricted to one person? Let me know if you've encountered this reading of "take it offline", from Gen Z or elsewhere
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/amandabrummitt_i-spend-a-lot-of-time-talking-about-communication-activity-7402116821522567168-T5vD -
Fun example of semantic drift, but is it restricted to one person? Let me know if you've encountered this reading of "take it offline", from Gen Z or elsewhere
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/amandabrummitt_i-spend-a-lot-of-time-talking-about-communication-activity-7402116821522567168-T5vD -
4 everyday #phrases that may indicate someone is highly #intelligent
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4 everyday #phrases that may indicate someone is highly #intelligent
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The phrase "pulling out all the stops", meaning to do something particularly well, commiting fully or with particular vigour, aplomb and excellence, comes from organ playing. Stops determine what airflow goes to what pipes. When you "pull out all the stops", the organ is at full force. #language #phrases
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🤔🧐🥸😎🤓🩷💁♀️*10 phrases kind people use without realizing how powerful they are👉
10 phrases kind people use without realizing how powerful they are https://thevessel.io/a-lc-10-phrases-kind-people-use-without-realizing-how-powerful-they-are/
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20 #American #Phrases That Sound Friendly But Signal You’re In #Trouble
https://www.oldest.org/people/american-phrases-sound-friendly/
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20 #American #Phrases That Sound Friendly But Signal You’re In #Trouble
https://www.oldest.org/people/american-phrases-sound-friendly/
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11 #Phrases Deeply #Unhappy People Use On A Regular Basis
https://www.oldest.org/people/phrases-deeply-unhappy-people-use/
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#Monochrome #MonochromeMonday #photography #MondayMotivation
"Pull your socks up, it's Monday!"
"You mean: LIKE THAT?"
"Ärmel hoch, es ist Montag!"
"Wie denn?" -
My number one japanese phrase for a proper misunderstanding at the moment:
"Shakai no mado ga aiteiru!/社会 の 窓 が 空いている"lit. Translation
"The window to society is open!"Real meaning
"Your fly is open!" -
“You’ll Have Had Your Tea”: the thread about a press fabrication of a popularised myth
This thread was originally written and published in May 2023.
In June 1983, the City of Glasgow launches its fondly remembered “Glasgow’s Miles Better” advertising slogan, as seen below in curious company with Margaret Thatcher. This confident, cheerful self-promotion of the City is something that Glasgow seems much more comfortable and at home with than Edinburgh and its more recent, insipid, uninspiring, cringeworthy attempts like “Inspiring Capital” or “Incredinburgh“.
“Portrait of Margaret Thatcher, Glasgow’s Miles Better Campaign”, Norman Edgar. Photograph from Lyon & Turnbull auction listing, August 2013, where it fetched £1,062Of course if you focus-grouped a sample of self-respecting Glaswegians on what Edinburgh’s slogan should be, you would likely find “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” in amongst the responses. As any resident of that City will tell you, in Glasgow they’ll ask you if you want to come in for your tea, in Edinburgh you’ll get the former cold response. Which all got me thinking… (you know where this is going now, don’t you?) Just where and when does the phrase/jibe “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” come from?
Now, if you’ll Google this for yourself you’ll find what I consider to be an incredulous claim that it originates with Mackintosh of Borlum of all characters, in 1729. If you don’t know the story of the eccentric Brigadier, it’s worth a refresh. By 1729, he was an ageing Jacobite has-been, noted for his spectacular military derring-do in the 1715 rebellion, matched only by his incompetence as a leader. By 1729 the septugenarian warrior lived in captivity in Edinburgh under bond. It is claimed that our hero tired of being offered the faddish new drink of tea, which he found weak and effeminate, and so went around informing his hosts that he had “had his tea” in order that he could instead move straight on to a harder, manlier drink.
William Mackintosh the Younger of Borlum, as a colonel in French service, c. 1707. From “Brigadier Mackintosh of Borlum, Jacobite Hero and Martyr”, A. M. Mackintosh, 1918Indeed, Mackintosh *does* write of tea in some disgust in 1729. He even writes the phrase “I am now asked if I have had my tea“. Case closed. Right? But the problem is, those 10 words are only a cherry-picked selection of what he fully wrote and without the rest, the context of what he was complaining about is gone and the meaning changes. What he wrote was, firstly:
- “Formerly I had been served with two or three substantial dishes of beef, mutton and fowl, garnished with their own wholesome gravy. I am not served up little expensive ashets with English pickles, Indian mangoes and anchovy sauces“
And secondly:
- “When I come to a friend’s house of a morning, I used to be asked if I had had my morning draught yet. I am now asked if I have had my tea and in lieu of the big quaich with strong ale and toast, and after a dram of good wholesome Scots spirits, there is now the tea-kettle put to the fire, the tea-table and silver and china equipage brought in, and marmalade and cream“
So what Borlum is actually complaining about is not about the coldness of his reception in Edinburgh, it’s quite the opposite – it’s all too nice. He is discontent that in the post-Union, Georgian capital of “North Britain”, Scottish culinary culture has been changed and gentrified by English influences and. Gone are hearty meat and drink, and in are delicate teas, condiments, scones and pleasantries. He is not being asked “You’ll have had your tea” so that his hosts don’t have to give him any, he’s being asked so that they can serve him the latest trends in conversational dining and drinking, and are most insistent on giving them to him even if he’d rather drink and belch!
That Googled explanation just doesn’t ring true – so how did it come to be on the internet as “fact”? If you read it on the internet it must be true, yes? Where does the source of this spurious claim originate? The earliest I can trace it back to is a single unreferenced line in an anonymous compendium of Edinburgh “facts” (many of them demonstrably dubious) on the Scotsman website some 20 years ago. Much of what is in the list is true, but an not insignificant amount is either not or is wishful thinking.
Scotsman.com, 29th May 2003, archived copyThe following year, London-based travel writer Benedict Le Vay included a variation of this explanation in his book “Eccentric Edinburgh“, a travel-guide to the city from the “Eccentric” series by Chalfont St. Peter-based publisher Bradt Travel Guides. This series is a light-hearted “insiders guide” to cities, trying to find their “hidden corners and spooky stories” that others guides don’t cover. So it’s not a reference work by any stretch of the imagination, and ofference no provenance for this explanation.
Page 142, “Eccentric Edinburgh”, Benefict Le Vay, 2004The Mackintosh of Borlum trail goes cold for about a decade, resurfacing in the Scotsman’s online sister publication “i” in the best traditions of Johnston Press churnalism. The unverified story has now established itself as “fact”, and now propagates itself through blogs and social media with the respectable sounding references pointing (in good faith) to two newspapers (which should know better) and a well-selling travel book from an established author and publisher.
inews.co.uk, 9th March 2017So if that is what the origins of “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” are not, then what are they? Well, the earliest I can find the phrase in print is in 1938, used by the sports journalist, columnist, playwright and comedic author and poet Albert Mackie, who had a particular love of vernacular patter. Edinburgh born and bred, but often working in Glasgow, he wrote a light-hearted essay entitled “The Pleasures of Edinburgh” in a book – called simply “Scotland” – edited by J. R. Allan and released to coincide with the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow in 1938.
“Laugh Out Lout at Talking Glasgow”, Albert MackieBut Mackie was not writing here in jest at his home city, rather in defence of it. He was pointing out that “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” was exactly the sort of jibe that a Glaswegian would come up with in their never-ending mission to let the whole world know they are the friendliest people on the planet. But we can’t credit him with conjuring the saying itself – only writing it down – as it’s clearly an established and recognised phrase at that time in Scotland by the way he refers to it. However I cannot find it printed before then in books or newspapers.
“The Pleasures of Edinburgh” by Albert Mackie, from “Scotland“, edited by J. R. Allan, 1938Of course, there are other cities in Scotland beyond Edinburgh and Glasgow (not that the denizens of either of those places would have you believe it), and the phrase pops up again next in the Dundee Courier in 1945, in a jokes column entitled “Heard on the Tram“, but with the butt of the joke extended to Aberdonians.
“Heard on the Tram”, Dundee Courier- Thursday 18 October 1945In 1953, the football writer Tom Nicholson – another son of Edinburgh – brought the saying up again in a Daily Record column called “Tom Nicholson Accuses / Charles Shankland Replies” where the form was for the pair to have amusing arguments over sport and Edinburgh vs. Glasgow relations. It appears intermittently thereafter in print, particularly in Glasgow’s Daily Record / Sunday Mail. In 1970 the latter’s columnist, novelist Jan Webster (1924-2002), attributed it to Scottish women in general as a phrase used when guests were being politely told not to stay too long. In 1978, Record writer Max Hodes published it in his “Official Scottish Joke Book“. Hodes wrote “funnies” for the paper and like Tom Nicholson and Albert Mackie, was an Edinburgh man, writing for a Glasgow publication. So perhaps the joke is really on Glasgow given it is Edinburgh men who popularised it in their papers.
It is’t just comedy writers who have imortalised the phrase however; the autobiographies of the prominent figures of Sir Ludovic Kennedy (1990) and Ian Hamilton KC (1994, who as a law student in 1950 was one of the gang who liberated the Stone of Destiny from Westminster back to Scotland) both use the phrase with a fondness when recalling their time in Edinburgh. Nevertheless the saying continues to pop-up endlessly in coffee table books about Edinburgh and Scottish culture, such as “Edinbuggers vs. Weegies” by Ian Black of 2003, which goes as far as suggesting a more modern ending to it (and who really actually says “Edinbuggers” anyway?)
Weegies vs. Edinbuggers, Ian Black, 2003A more outlandish – and even more improbable than Mackintosh of Borlum – provenance for the saying is Reginald Hill, who controversially attributes the saying to Yorkshire in one of his “a “Dalziel and Pascoe” novels! But – in print at least – he seems to be the only person making this particular claim. Most unusually, it has come to my attention (thank you to Al McVittie for this insight) that the phrase “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” appears in a 1974 episode of the childrens’ TV show Bagpuss, featuring Hamish the tartan pincushion and Tavish McTavish.
“You’ll Have Had Your Tea” with Hamish and Tavish McTavish, Bagpuss, 1974The saying was revitalised and spread to a wider audience in the 1990s and noughties by Graeme Garden (an Aberdonian) and the late, great, Barry Cryer in their “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue” improv characters Hamish and Dougal, who always open their sketches with the saying. This resulted in a spin-off series called, imaginatively, “You’ll Have Had Your Tea“. The basic characters apparently date back to 1979, which coincidentally was when the Oxford Theatre Group ran a late-night Fringe review show in Edinburgh called… “You’ll Have Had Your Tea!“
I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, the Doings of Hamish & Dougal. BBC Audio cover.So there isn’t any one, definitive source of this saying. It was definitely popularised and a recognised part of inter-city rivalry by the time it was first put in print in 1938 and Edinburgh men writing in the Scottish press kept it alive thereafter. But I can categorically state that it was not Mackintosh of Borlum who gave us the saying back in 1729 and if anything this is a salutary lesson in the dangers of unreferenced, anonymous “listicles” being published and republished by seemingly reputable sources and crystallising over time into hard “facts”.
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