Flying fish? Tell it to the marines

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I am currently reading a collection of folk tales from the coasts of Britain and Ireland. There is amixture of myth legend and historical accuracy and I've found out some interesting bits of trivia.

For example Sodor is the name of a mythical island which joined the Isle of Mann tobecome a bigger island. It's not just where Thomas the Tank Engine hangs out.

It is a myth.

One thing that interested me was a section on sailor's tales. There is a story about a sailor telling him mother all he has seen, that in Jamaica there are mountains made of sugar and rivers of rum. When he was in the Red Sea they drew up a wheel from Pharoah's chariot and thsthe had seen flying fish.

This is where his mother calls him out, she's happy to believe about sugar mountains, rivers of rum, Pharaoh's chariot, but flying fish, no way.

This is ironic because flying fish do exist, they're very common in the tropics, and are seen all the time.

There is another story related to King Charles, the source doesn't say which one but it's assumed it was Charles II.

He was similarly incredulous about stories of flying fish so he asked one of his admirals if it was true. When the admiral confirmed it was he said that in future if he wasn't sure if a story is true or not he would, "Tell it to the marines."

This may or may not be true, as it the case with most stories about phrase origins but I thought it a nice story regardless, and thought it would give us a chance to talk about other phrases which are commonly used.

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Victoria Coren Mitchell used to present a programme called Balderdash and Piffle about the origins of peculiar phrases. Some were decided straight away, but others remained undecided with lots of competing theories, each equally credible.

One was the phrase to go pear shaped, meaning to go wrong big time. The explanation I remember was that it was a flying term and that when performing a loop de loop the trajectorbe circular be circular, if it changed, and went pear shaped the plane would crash.

There were other equally credible alternative derivations that I can't remember.

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I never understood what being a "dog in the manger" meant. The manger was not the hut for animals but was the food trough for the animals that served as a crib. So if you were a dog in the manger, you have no use for the food but you don't want the other animals to eat it either.

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@coluber2001,

Again it's just speculation, but it could mean that the dog has eaten all the food meant for the livestock, or it could be a reference to the Nativity.

But it's most likely something else.

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There's probably a ton of sayings the derivation of which were unaware.

It's fun to delve into their meaning.

I was watching an English sitcom and they used the term, "being on tenter hooks." It means anxiously awaiting an answer, and it's derived from some kind of a rack for drying textiles that were dyed.

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@coluber2001,

When I was younger I worked in a meat packing factory. One of the jobs was 'humping' taking the sides of beef off the wagon and putting them in the chilling room. There was a rail in the ceiling and tenter hooks hung off that.

It was the name of the hooks that we would hang the beef on.

It may well have been used in the textile industry as well, but it's definitely what we called the hooks in the meat industry.

Tenterhooks is an eggcorn, a word that is commonly mispronounced as in eggcorn for acorn.

A lot of people think they are tenderhooks, similarly people think of escape goat, bowl in a China shop and from the gecko.

Comedian Dave Gorman does a whole show on it. He's one of these interactive comedians who uses social media and power point a lot. I think the show in question might have been googlewhack.

Then again all his shows are a bit off the wall, ghe first one was him tracking down 100 other people who were also called Dave Gorman.

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@izzythepush,

"From the gecko." That's a good one. The derivation of the phrase, "from the get-go" is confusing enough. In America the gecko is a cartoon animal that sells insurance. Most people have never seen a live gecko.

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@coluber2001,

In Dave Gorman's show he looks at ranges of its use all over the Internet. In the case of escape goat, some people use it as you would imagine, as scapegoat but misspelled, but others don't.

One person wrote something like, I feel really trapped at work I really need to escape goat.

It makes you wonder how their minds work.

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@izzythepush,

On a Bob Dylan song he says "scrapegoat" to my ears. On the album "Another Side of Bob Dylan." Smile

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@edgarblythe,

He's always been a bit gravelly it's probably just him.

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I know know if this is an original, but it's certainly a very old use of a familiar phrase, almost.

It concerns the legends around the coast of Scotland, and the belief that witches could conjure up winds. They believed that some Finns and Lapps had the power and would sell winds to sailors. There is a quotation from Thomas Fuller, writing in The Profane State in 1648,
"There be many witches at this day in Lapland, who sell winds to Mariners for money, (and must they not needs go whom the Devil drives?)

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There's always the famous, "kiss this guy" by Jimi Hendrix.

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@coluber2001,

Or the terrible joke about Mike Cloud being stood on at a Rolling Stones concert.

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Arthur Conan Doyle is the manresponsible for the mystery surrounding the Marie Celeste.

He misreported the story, saying that all the lifeboats were still on board when the ship was discovered.

There was one lifeboat on board when ghe ship set sail and that was missing. In all likelihood there was a false alarm, they all got into the lifeboat which subsequently sank.

Conan Doyle also was a prime mover in the Piltdown Man hoax.

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@izzythepush,

Conan Doyle was a **** up but I like some of his work.

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Flying fish? Tell it to the marines

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