I have a dear friend - Mary - who is from a farming background and her
various sayings are delightful. I hope you will enjoy these too.
‘ he’s lost condition’. i.e. he’s not doing well or failing. This presumably
originated from looking at animals but it’s very apt and I find I use it myself
now.
In the same vein’ ‘peely Wally’ is a a Scots adjectival expression meaning
pale, wan and off-colour, in the sense of looking unwell and tired. “She's had
the flu and she's looking a bit peely-wally.” When I came across this one I
didn’t know what it meant so had to look it up so as not to cause offence by
asking.
Another of Mary’s is ‘her feathers are down’. In other words she’s
depressed, or down in the dumps. Incidentally, the ‘dumps' wasn't a place
but a commonplace medieval expression meaning dejection; melancholy; depression.
The last one I have from Mary is - ‘her head’s in the shed’. Presumably this
means her heads all over the place, or she’s not thinking straight.
My Granny used to tell me she couldn’t run because she ‘had a bone in her
leg’ and I believed that one as a valid excuse for years.
There are so many lovely idioms which if we lost sight of it would be very sad.
The following are more commonly used but if you tried to explain their
meaning to a Martian you’d have to think quite hard!
Actions speak louder than words
An arm and a leg
Back to the drawing board
The ball’s in your court
Barking up the wrong tree
Beating around the bush
Biting more than you can chew.
Bob's your uncle
Never wash your dirty linen in public
Treading on thin ice
Getting on his/her high horse
Making a mountain out of a molehill
Putting the cat among the pigeons
It’s neither here nor there
Thinking outside the box
Over the hill
Chewing the fat
Chasing your tail
Throwing your weight around
Punching above you weight
To go spare
Bob’s your uncle!
I’m sure you could join in and add lots more. But when you think about it it
adds to our rich heritage of language.
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