On Apr 6, 2007, at 0:57, David in Ballarat wrote:
Yesterday I was listening to talk-back callers on the radio
remembering Australian sayings which are no longer around. One was a
real doozie and I'd love to know whether any of you have heard it
before, and if so it's origins.
An elderly man told of how his grandfather, a staunch Presbyterian who
never swore in his life, had a saying which he used when the occasion
demanded. You have to use the appropriate intonation to get the full
effect, but he would curse in his loudest voice: " Cheese & rice, a
muddy bucket of pitch!!!!"
Never heard this particular "curse" but, based on what I know -- in
general -- about curses, euphemisms, etc, I'd stake my linguistic
reputation <g> on the first part (cheese & rice) being a substitute for
"Jesus Christ". Until fairly recently, calling God's name in vain (for
frivolous purposes, like cursing) was a serious tresspas for all
religious folk while, at the same time, God's name was considered more
potent than most sex-related curses.
So, a lot of "slalom-ing" was done around/between those two goalposts,
and one of the ways was to make up a phrase that sounded *almost* like
what you really wanted to say, but *not exactly* -- you called on God
to strengthen the curse, but never to the point where others could
claim it was offensive for being used frivolously. Another way was to
reverse (or almost) syllables; "matko boska!" (oh, Mother of God!),
became "batko moska". Not the best possible substitute -- because it
didn't make sense (the way "cheese and rice" *does* make sense), but
easily understood by all Poles. I've seen a similiar
syllable-reverse-euphemism word play in English (though on a sexual,
not religious curse): "I don't give a flying duck" about this or that.
Don't know about the second part (especially since I'm not familiar
with Oz accents), nor about the origin. In Polish, such phrases tended
to start as individual inventions. Some of them, eventually, migrated
into common use area. Some of them were "adopted" only within a
particular family (what we used to call "hermetic idiom"). Some of them
remained the "property of the inventor", and the inventor *only*,
forever, with nobody else using them in the same kind of need...
There's no telling which of the 3 categories this one belongs to.
--
Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line:
unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
