Engineering Origin of a Common Phrase?

I believe I have seen the term wabbler to shafts driving the work rolls of a rolling mill. It was many years ago and my memory is failing.

BAD

An automated supermarket checkout used the modern equivalent of "Cat in a Bag" / "Pig in a Poke" on me yesterday.

"Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area"

Cheers,

Dave

'He's lost his bottle' started (as I understand it) in Birkenhead in the Wirral, where ships are (were) scrapped using oxy-acetylene cutters. The origin was not quite the same, as is common with such expressions, rather it was 'His bottle's gone' - ie he has run out of gas.

Unless, of course, you know different ... ?

Cheers, Tim

I thought that was cockney slang - bottle and glass - a**e. So lost his bottle would mean brown underpants, but I could be wrong.

Clive

I thought that was cockney slang - bottle and glass - a**e. So lost his bottle would mean brown underpants, but I could be wrong.

Clive you are quite correct. As I was born and brought up in the London area Cockney rhyming slang was in everyday usage. Some others are:

Whistle and flute = suit

Apples and pears = stairs

and Porkies comes from Pork Pies = lies.

There are dozens of others which some will remember but are slipping out of common usage today as London becomes more inter-racial. In the poorer parts of London in the olden days the population consisted of a high percentage of Jewish people and their slang inter-woven with the locals made some interesting combinations!

Slightly off topic, this famous prose from Bernard Levin:

I don't suppose Shakespeare coined all these phrases but they are all first recorded in his works.

Rod

Hi Tim,

He's lost his bottle' started (as I understand it) in Birkenhead in the Wirral, where ships are (were) scrapped using oxy-acetylene cutters. The origin was not quite the same, as is common with such expressions, rather it was 'His bottle's gone' - ie he has run out of gas.

You could be correct but from my experience of the Birkenhead shipyards, mostly Cammell Lairds, they did do a lot of ship repairs and building but almost no scrapping. The most used scrapyard for vessels was Inverkeithing in Rossythe in Scotland. Today the hulks get towed to India (Bombay aka Mumbai) for cutting up. My late grandfather (who died before my birth) was a plumber at Cammell Lairds during the war converting liners into troop ships.

And on the subject of old mechanical engineering terms and how they have changed over the years.

In an old textbook I have from the mid 1800s is a treatise on adjusting holes to size with a "rimmer", today that has become reamer.

The other thing that often causes confusion is the American terminology and the English for the same item.

Drill rod = silver steel/tool steel, as it is/was used for making drills and cutting tools.

Wrist Pin = Gudgeon Pin

Piston Pin = Little End Pin

Circlip = Snap Pin

And there are dozens of others.

Thank you, John. By reading this forum I keep learning how our languages have diverged. I find an enormous amount of good information here but sometimes struggle with the terminology. I will keep reading, and struggling, and learning.

John

My late father, a British electrical engineer, spent much of his career exchanging technical material with the US Navy. In 1970 I remember he and his colleagues getting into a right pickle* when they realised that American manuals referred to electrical earth as "ground". Obviously no true Brit would be able to cope with such an outrageous misuse of the Queen's English! All the manuals would have to be rewritten, just as British spellings like colour in the Harry Potter stories have all been corrected in US editions.

It must have been a generational thing because I, in 1970 only just out of nappies (ahem), was fully aware that electrical ground and earth are exactly the same thing.

English speaking nations choosing alternative words like "fall" for "autumn" is one thing, but I don't understand why we sometimes pronounce the same word in a different way. For instance , why is "buoy" said "boo-ee" in the US when it's "boy" in the UK?

Regards, Dave

* perhaps "getting into a pickle" is a reference to the well known acid bath.

I think if you go back far enough 'fall' was standard English, and 'autumn' is the oddball. Those on the far side of the pond stuck with the old 'correct' word. This probably happened with many other words. Language is always changing and if you have several countries speaking the same one it's not surprising they diverge especially before the age of mass communication.

The language differences between the English speaking countries are minor compared with Chinese attempts to produce instruction manuals in English.

The language differences between the English speaking countries are minor compared with Chinese attempts to produce instruction manuals in English.

(BBC programme a few years ago) Pronunciation and meaning changes often happen when a leader in a social group miss-pronounces or misuses a word accidentally or on purpose and the group take it up. Then it may spread or die.

A problem with a few phrases that have been used incorrectly in a book or newspaper where the context clearly points to it being a mistake are still treated by linguists as the first 'bona fide' use of the phrase.

Huge changes occurred in the 19th century when poorly educated people wrote without having enough training in standard spelling. People's names would be changed when a curate entered their christening details improperly owing to not understanding their local accent.

Edited By Bazyle on 01/06/2016 21:43:06

Some say that the American English is nearer the English of Shakespeare that modern English spoken in England. Afrikaa'ns is Dutch of 2 hundred years ago. French Canadian is different to the French in France today. A similar sort of thing has happened with us in the south over the last 150 years. Ian S C

Oh that made me laugh

The number of times I have had a pingf*ckit

Thought I'd ping you because baseline, going ballistic, blockbuster, and pixelated (meaning drunk) are all on my radar this morning.

Can anyone confirm that the rhymes in Chaucer reveal that he spoke English with a northern accent.? Very hard to believe I know. My locals assure me that civilisation definitely ends at Cold Ashton crossroads. I've not risked going that far north myself.

Chaucer was writing at about the time of the Great Vowel Shift . Whether the old pronunciation sounds more like Northern English I'll leave you to decide - I don't understand phonetics. As far as I can make out, Elizabethan English sounds a bit more like a "rural" accent, perhaps typically from East Anglia (bootiful for all you turkey fans).

Rod

It has always been confusing to me when watching a US engineering video and the person states they are sodering. Strangely the Websters US dictionary site spells it soldering. I wonder what happened to the L?

Oh I Know..... Who was it that said No L

Regards
John

Edited By John McNamara on 02/06/2016 14:32:23