h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hey, I never thought about that. Is it something to do with honey, or something gross and sick?

I must know.

I hate to be uninteresting, but I thought 'the bees knees' was simply a mildly inventive way of saying 'the business' - ie, something that the speaker perceives to be extremely good, the best in town. It didn't occur to me that it might have anything to do with dodgy experiments with honey or whatever.

Or have I been be barking up the the wrong tree altogether, all these years...

Hah! It seems that the English don't realy know the true meaning of the word English!

I am, of course, referring to the world of snooker - I am fast becoming an expert in this curious and absorbing game. What I would call 'English', the British (somewhat unimaginatively) call side.

And hey, all you snooker aficionados, if you can strike the ball with bottom, why not just say bum? And what have you got against red balls, in that their excluded from the group of 'colors'? (Only joking, I understand really.)

Serious question (related to above): is it true you have no equivalent of the expression 'body English'?

Define it and we can tell you if there is an expression!
We have 'body language' which refers to non verbal communication such as gestures and body positioning which are interpreted consciously or unconsciously.

Look, it's real easy...

When you put English on something like a ball, you make it curve, right?

Well, 'body English' is when you move your body as if you could make the ball curve. Like, when your bowling, and you want your ball to swerve more to the left, so you kinda lean left, twisting your body in the very sensible hope the ball will do likewise.

C'm on, you must have done it! That's 'body English'.

Now, what do you guys call it?

I think we call it swerving to the left.
If you did this on a motorbike you might call it 'leaning into the bends'. If you were lucky you might even 'get your knee down'. (As opposed to 'get your leg over' which means something completely different!)

I know I'm rather late on this one but the phrase going to the dogs is from old times when the master of the house would feed the scraps of his dinner to his dog. Anything that wasn't good enough for the mastewr to eat would "Go to the dogs" Either the Oxford or Cambridge press do a book called the .......... Book of Proverbial english which has every weird English phrase ever. I think it even mentions bollocks.

I had always assumed that this was the origin of knackers for testicles - the spelling was (incorrectly) changed to align with knackers, as in glue factory!

Just as I thought - you haven't got a word or phrase for it at all. You probably didn't even realise you were doing it!

After trying (and failing) to think of some counterexamples, I reckon that we don't often use the word 'English' to describe things in the same way we might use the names of other countries.

Clearly, we use 'English' to describe where things come from, geographically speaking, and also to differentiate between specifically different kinds of products (ie English and French mustard), but we don't usually use it in one sense that we do use the names of other nations - to describe things other people supposedly do differently to us.

(Sometimes that difference is more wishful than actually truthful, as in the example where one old English (and Italian) term for syphillis was 'The French disease', whereas in France, one term was 'The English disease')

I reckon we wouldn't refer to something as 'English', unless we were trying to discriminate between it and an alternative thing that we could relate to another country or countries.

Of course, I don't have the remotest idea why we call spin or curve 'English'.

Clearly, once that term became widely used and understood, someone thought up 'body English'.

Now, I know the Brits aren't so self-restrained that they don't sometimes use 'body English'.

But given the richness of the language, surely someone must have coined a phrase to describe it.

So, what is British English for 'body English'?

Even in America, it seems to be a flexible term -

Here, it seems to be used as mime to talk to horses :
http://www.mccallhorseworld.com/Lunging.htm


Here, it also seems to mean mime (in the text a few screens down) :
http://www.antonnews.com/syossetjerichotribune/1998/09/18/news/global.html


Also, my search engine turned up the following link while I was looking. It has some explanations on the origins of English phrases, though the UK/USA part does at first glance appear a little oversimplistic (i.e. we *do* use 'mad' over here to mean angry as well, and have since my grandmother was young)

http://www.clta.on.ca/ce.htm

just listening. curious about the whole "sod" thing, and where "monty" came from.. why? 's ok.. i'm just gonna hang around and maybe learn something..

Hi all!

Saint Zax*

*infinity as a learning experience..

Sod, being short for sodomite, is still offensive to many people,but can be used by Englishmen among friends in "Sod it" "Sod all" meaning nothing at all etc (I'm not sure if women can use these phrases in mixed company. They couldnt when I was young, but that was a long time ago.) It has nothing to do with "sod" meaning turf which literary use has provided innocent merriment for generations of schoolboys by appearing in the Christmas carol "Good King Wenceslas"
I'll let someone else have a turn at "Monty" - my favourite explanation concerns Montague Burton but the origin's disputed

Harking back to earlier in the thread, this morning I saw a car with the licence plate 'B*****K'. I didn't have time to figure out how it was done, other than noticing a well-placed screw at the foot of a '1'. Was the 'C' really there? I can't work it out.

Maybe someone covered up the r.h.s of the second '0' in '100'?

Ooh, yes - that would be very crafty. Especially of he/she used a 'background' color screw!

Another usage of 'dog', in computing at least, is in the phrase 'dog-slow', applied to a machine which is (from age or overload) several times slower than one would really wish.

Sorry to interrupt this flow of erudition with almost irrelevant juvenility, but I have seen a car with the plate "BIG HUG"
as in B16 HUG. It was a Monday & I smiled all day.
Everyone thought I was barmy - now there's a word.

That is definitely my computer. It is dog-v.slow.

We call dogs 'man's best friend', but we don't speak of them very highly!

I think my brain is dog-slow - from both age and overload.