Why we say nonsensical things
This one is for those who want to have their cake and eat it!
My son was complaining about the phrase ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it’. His argument is sound - if there is a cake in the kitchen, and he has a slice, then of course he eats it. That led us to the discussion of other nonsensical phrases that have become proverbs.
(The cakes in my kitchen!)
But don’t worry - I have the answer! It comes in the shape of a wonderful reference library of books at home that enables me to put to bed such silliness. Here are the top five phrases that I wanted explaining:
You can’t have your cake and eat it.
It started as a proverb collected in 1546 by a chap called John Heywood. The translation from the English of the Tudors has done us a disservice as in fact it really should be ‘you can’t expect to eat your cake and keep it too’ (that’s a version by Victorian writer Charles Kingsley).
Makes perfect sense now. If you go to the kitchen and eat the cake, it won’t be there when you go back for another slice.
I could care less (American version)
This is just silly. In the UK we have kept the version ‘I couldn’t care less’ which makes sense grammatically. In the US the phrase undoes itself suggesting you could care less than you do at the moment so something does matter to you, even if only a little. My reference book suggests it might have come about because it was said ironically, but, hey, folks in America, you might want to drift back to the UK usage so we wouldn’t trip over this phrase so much.
Lock, stock and barrel
This means ‘everything’ but the specific reference isn’t barrels of goods or stock in a shop as I thought but the parts of a flintlock gun. The lock is the firing mechanism. Apparently it came into modern usage long after the flintlock was gone and perhaps as a phrase popularised by the historical novelist Walter Scott.
Raining cats and dogs
Used in the UK for very heavy rain. The origin is obscure (it’s been around since the 17th century) but my trusty tome suggests it might be connected to the idea that a furious argument was to ‘fight like cat and dog’ and the idea got connected to intense rain. That seems the most plausible of the explanations offered. In my head before reading this, I’d done a rhyming slang ‘cats and dogs’ to ‘frogs’ and thought of the Plagues of Egypt. It could be that, couldn’t it? I’ll leave it to you, dear reader.
Get shirty
This means to be bad-tempered or irritable, often heard in the version ‘don’t you get shirty with me’. The suggestion is the underlying notion is to keep your shirt on - i.e. don’t take it off in preparation for fisticuffs. So the phrase has done a happy little pirouette into a shorter version of itself.
And the answer to why we say nonsensical things? It’s because language is about communication, not accuracy, so as long as enough of us understand what it means and like the image it conjures up, we’ll use it.
Even if it is silly.
New Book
In other news, the next in my Regency Secrets series is out 9th May (ebook) 22nd May (paperback). If you belong to a book club, run a bookshop or local library, and would like a zoom visit for summer reading, do let me know. Also, I’m happy to call in in-person if not too far from Oxfordshire. The book is packed full of period details, a crash-course in Romanticism, but through the lens of a murder-mystery set in the Lake District.
