Someone accustomed to walking over freshly ploughed fields is a clod-hopper Clod-hopper is used to mean "foot", clod-hoppers = "feet" in Australian slang, frequently denoting feet of a particularly large size. Thus, "move yer clod-hoppers!" is a request to move one's f...
I remember waiting anxiously to hear what friends and acquaintances thought of the first book I had written when it was published. Imagine my dismay when the very first (written) response I got from _anyone_ expressed disappointment that I'd ended a sentence with a preposition. To me, the convolutio...
When I was a kid we called them elastic bands, or 'lacka bands.
There was a game we used to play with a large piece of elastic formed into a ring that involved jumping in and out and I was never very good at it. It was known as "elastics", and it was eventually banned at my school.
We are fortunate in my family to currently have five generations. That's my grandparents (Nan and Uncle John, maternal grandmother and maternal stepgrandfather), my mother (Granky), me (Mum/Grandma), my children, and my so-far only grandchild. When my oldest daughter was very very small she was a pr...
"good of" I've always thought to have a link with the lazy speech habit of "would of". Not that the correct version would be "good have", as it is with "would have", but rather that it sounds euphonious if one's ear is attuned to "would of" as a corr...
I wonder whether (and I have absolutely no data to support this either way) the substitutions occur to make the unfamiliar sounds more familiar to non-native speakers? That is, the combination of letters that occurs by the substitution of either "t" or "s" for "th" beco...