20100123

TV and E-mail

This is original I believe
If television has killed the art of conversation then the telephone and e-mail have killed the art of letter writing

A maxim a day

A maxim a day will help you maximise your day.
(It's a long time since I kept to this maxim but there was a time when I tried to. I'm still looking for a notebook of around 150 I did a while back).

20100121

Boiling gallops


My mother would sometimes say the kettle's "boiling gallops". I discussed it with her once and she said she thought it should be the kettle's galloping. The only reference to "boiling gallops" I can find on the net is an entry in a dictionary of Newfoundland English! See here.

Stone the crows

My mother would sometimes use this exclamation of incredulity or annoyance (sometimes with the adjective 'flaming' inserted).
Apparently, there have been a few attempts to explain the origin of this odd phrase. A croze is the groove at the end of a wooden barrel that holds the end plate in place. It has been suggested that the expression was previously stow the croze, ie break open the barrel. There's no support for this, though.
The more prosaic idea - an allusion to throwing stones at crows - is much more likely. Some English sources think it American and vice-versa but it is held to have originated in Australia. Most of the early citations in print come from there. It has a sort of Australian twang to it and is in common with several other similar phrases, all with the same meaning: starve the bardies [are grubs], stiffen the crows, spare the crow. If that's true I don't know how my mother came to use it.

Not down Cardiff

One of my dad's this
"You don't have to shout, I'm not down Cardiff!"

Well, I'll go to Cardiff

This is something my dad would say from time to time. In a book called 'Newport First Stop - 100 Years of News Stories' the author Derrick Cyril Vaughan begins Chapter 4 with these two paragraphs.
'Well I'll Go To Cardiff" 1850-1860
The title of this book reflects the importance to South Wales and Newport in particular of the coming of the railway. It opened up a whole new world to the inhabitants who up till then had perforce to use the stage-coaches for long journeys which could entail days of travel. Now it was possible for many of the cities of the United Kingdom to be reached in a few hours.
The fact that Newport was going to be the first stop on the line caused a certain amount of jealousy in Cardiff which had overtaken Newport both in size and population in the early forties. The knowledge that Newport, purely by geographical location, would receive the first train irked the Cardiffians no end and the Newportonians knew it. From that time on the expression "Well I'll go to Cardiff" was born and is used, particularly by old Newportonians, to denote amazement or disbelief.

The Bible repeats itself

I think this is original, though derivative. "The Bible repeats itself. It has to - no-one's listening."