Sayings from the Old Country

[footfootfoot]

My pal says "I'll be jiggered up a hemlock" for, I'll be damned.

[infinite monkey]

Sure and the next thing ye'll be wantin' is haggis.

[casimendocina]

Originally Posted by DanaC

No, that's a well-known phrase used to describe a particular kind of upper-class girl or woman. Usually slightly derogatory, it suggests someone with that particular kind of well-bred, jolly enthusiasm and zeal, but not that bright.

Love this phrase-used to use it a lot about 15 years ago, but these days I don't incorporate it into my conversation nearly enough. Time to change that.

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by casimendocina

I used the phrase "jolly hockey sticks" this morning in conversation with a Canadian who had never heard of it. Would it be a strange expression for someone in the UK who hasn't read boarding school stories?

How do you use this phrase in a sentence?

[DanaC]

When the Labour party was holding elections for their deputy leader a couple of years ago, one of the potential candidates was Harriet Harman. I was kind of leaning towards her purely on the grounds that she was a woman and politically inoffensive. J and I talked about the election, and he said that someone he knew had met Harman a few times and said 'she's a bit jolly hockey sticks for my liking'.

[footfootfoot]

That's got a great lilt to it, sounds similar to "Goody Two Shoes" but different meaning. I'm trying to think if we have an analogous phrase for JHS.

Just came across this, from here:

Q From Kathy Sinclair, Australia: My colleagues and I are puzzled as to the origins of the phrase jolly hockey-sticks, used, it seems, to describe old-school-tie-type high jinks or behaviour. Can you elucidate how this phrase began?
A It’s not especially surprising that you’re puzzled, since you are half a world away from the British girls’ schools that provoked this parodic phrase, and in attitudes even further, if that were possible.
It is a very British expression, gently dismissive of the hearty, games-playing, unscholastic tone of many girls’ public schools, in which the game of hockey is a favourite sport. (Footnotes for non-Brits: public schools in Britain are actually fee-charging private schools separate from the state-run school system; they are patronised by the moneyed middle and upper classes, and the popular consciousness attributes an atmosphere of snobbery and privilege to them, not without cause. Also, hockey here is the field sport, not ice hockey.)
Such schools for girls were late on the scene compared with their counterparts for the male of the species. Early examples, in the middle nineteenth century, set up in deliberate imitation of public schools like Winchester and Eton, were the North London Collegiate School and the Cheltenham Ladies’ College. These institutions were headed respectively by firm friends Miss Frances Buss and Miss Dorothea Beale, thus provoking the anonymous rhyme:
Miss Buss and Miss Beale
Cupid’s darts do not feel.
How different from us,
Miss Beale and Miss Buss.
By the early years of the twentieth century, there were enough such girls’ schools in existence for a new genre of writing to evolve, of which the most celebrated early exponent was Angela Brazil. She and her successors and imitators did much to further this hearty, adventurous and sporting image.
A BBC radio comedy programme from 1950 was called Educating Archie and featured the ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy Archie Andrews. (Unkind people said that, as a ventriloquist, Peter Brough’s ideal medium was radio — when he appeared on TV people could see his lips move. His American counterpart Edgar Bergen had similar problems and he, too, was most successful on radio.) Though the show, even viewed in rose-tinted retrospect, was fairly dreadful, it was also extremely popular, in part because its producer was a genius at spotting up-and-coming new talent. The list of Archie’s tutors and supporting cast reads like a Who’s Who of British talent from the fifties and sixties — Harry Secombe, Hattie Jacques, Benny Hill, Sid James, Max Bygraves, Tony Hancock, Alfred Marks, Dick Emery, Robert Moreton, Bernard Miles and Julie Andrews, among others.
One of Archie’s tutors was Beryl Reid, who played the part of a ghastly schoolgirl named Monica, a parody of the sporty public-school type. She invented the phrase jolly hockey-sticks! on the show because, as she said once, “I know what sort of thing my characters should say!” Her phrase struck a chord and it has passed into the language.

[DanaC]

Cool! Thanks for that 3ft. I had no idea it originated on a radio show.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by footfootfoot

I'm trying to think if we have an analogous phrase for JHS.

I was kind of thinking "Stepford wives?" Superficially perfect, but completely insipid underneath. Or like going to college to "get her MRS degree," (translation for Brits: find a husband who will support her.) And after she's married she's a "trophy wife."

[Sundae]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

I was kind of thinking "Stepford wives?" Superficially perfect, but completely insipid underneath. Or like going to college to "get her MRS degree," (translation for Brits: find a husband who will support her.) And after she's married she's a "trophy wife."

Not really. I don't like to respond negatively without an alternative, but it's really not the same thing. Having read Stepford Wives I mean ( and we have them over here too).

Sports at school here DO NOT lead to college and money, so it's more of an outdoorsy type for its own sake. And without the independence/ anti-Goverment bias implied in America. Part of the mainstream huntin', fishin', shootin' community, but quite likely from landed gentry stock. Therefore right wing, but only in as far as maintaining the status quo. It doesn't mean airhead, but it does mean of a non-acaedemical mien. Hearty, bluff, a hiker, a camper.

It's a derogatory term, but not a really harsh one. Like calling someone a Slonae Ranger or a Hooray Henry. Look them up - I'm all explained out

[footfootfoot]

probably "Preppie" is as close as we come.

YMMV but I think "fun loving, not a care in the world, privileged, entitled, often well educated but not smart"

[DanaC]

Yes. That's close enough.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Thanks for the tenter hooks. We always used tender hooks but didn't know it was an American corruption.

[Sundae]

Like titbit/ tidbit... you corruptors

[infinite monkey]

Titbit?

Must admit I didn't know that one, but I did know tenterhooks.

We think everything is tender...like feet. (No offense, 3)

[footfootfoot]

Tendril is the night