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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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1. Of French origin it looks like: Here's a citation from 1530, in Jehan Palsgrave's Lesclarcissement de la langue françoyse:
"He maketh as thoughe butter wolde nat melte in his mouthe."
2. Donkey's years looks more likely to be donkey's ears ..
It is quite likely that donkey's ears was the earlier form and that it originated as rhyming slang, in an allusion to the length of the animal's ears. Donkey's ears/years is often shortened just to donkeys. That is characteristic of rhyming slang, as in syrup (of figs) - wig or plates (of meat) - feet.
Fiddlesticks.
From the Shakespearean proverb fiddlesticks meant something not worth attention, to fiddle around doing nothing, since the instrument is used in fiddling, hence the implication is that the fiddlestick is even less than the fiddle. Fiddlesticks took on it's more humorous beat in 1701 when George Farquhar used in his play Sir Henry Wildair : "Golden pleasures! golden fiddlesticks!". After this it was a quick jump from a disparaging word about idleness to the current synonym for nonsense. What it all boils down to is much ado about nothing.
Not my cup of tea:
People or things with which one felt an affinity began to be called 'my cup of tea' in the 1930s. Nancy Mitford appears to be the first to record that term in print, in the comic novel Christmas Pudding, 1932:
I'm not at all sure I wouldn't rather marry Aunt Loudie. She's even more my cup of tea in many ways.
In keeping with the high regard for tea, most of the early references to 'a cup of tea' as a description of an acquaintance are positive ones, i.e. 'nice', 'good', 'strong' etc. The expression is more often used in the 'not my cup of tea' form these days. This negative usage began in WWII. An early example of it is found in Hal Boyle's Leaves From a War Correspondent's Notebook column, which described English life and manners for an American audience. The column provided the American counterpart to Alister Cooke's Letter from America and was syndicated in various US papers. In 1944, he wrote:
[In England] You don't say someone gives you a pain in the neck. You just remark "He's not my cup of tea."
It's all gone pear shaped ...
Loads of possibles from a wide variety of professions to explain this one:
Here are just a few possible origins of the phrase:
The shape of a graph of probability in which there are a lot of extreme outcomes, distorting the data and making relatively-improbable events more statistically likely.
• A badly-thrown circular pot.
• A badly-blown glass ball.
• A badly-blown cathode ray tube.
• A badly made ship’s rivet, which has been allowed to cool badly.
• Two-day old party balloons which become saggy over time. Also Victorian gas balloons which do likewise.
• RAF pilots in the 1940s failing to achieve a perfect mid-air loop.
• Aircraft engines becoming distorted over time.
• A gun barrel failing, and becoming swollen as the pressure buckles the metal.
• Worn or badly-made metal bearings in large stationary engines.
• A crashed bi-plane, which buckles into guess what? A pear shape.
• A person who’s put weight on, but mainly in their lower half (sincerely doubt this is the one).
I did some research on this to save people some time -- credit to various sayings websites I looked this up on.
Thanks xx |
