GRcade

When you were younger did you have any proverbs you completely misunderstood?

I used to play a flight sim and every now and then it would pipe in with "Eat lead and die!" and I honestly thought they meant they wanted them to get lead poisoning which seemed a rather slow cruel way for someone to die. It was many, many years before I realised they just meant getting shot which in hindsight makes more sense I suppose .

So, it's time to share stories about proverbs you just didn't quite get.

'Cheap at half the price'. Well it would be!

have your cake and eat it

i thought 'have' meant eat your cake so in my head it was eat your cake and eat it

I thought it was ‘patience is avert you’ for an embarrassingly long time. Always wondered why it made no sense to me.

When I was little, I thought the phrase was "wait with baited breath" and wondered what kind of thing would consider the presence of someone's breath bait.

still wrote:'Cheap at half the price'. Well it would be!

It's meant to be "cheap at twice the price". Saying it the other way round is a sarcastic way of saying something's expensive, but people are stupid and ended up using the wrong one. (EDIT: Not directed at you!)

rinks wrote:

still wrote:'Cheap at half the price'. Well it would be!

It's meant to be "cheap at twice the price". Saying it the other way round is a sarcastic way of saying something's expensive, but people are stupid and ended up using the wrong one. (EDIT: Not directed at you!)

Actually, it really is "cheap at half the price", and "cheap at twice the price" is the misunderstanding. The word "cheap" used to mean something different.

What Americans think they mean when they say "I could care less"
So....you mean that you do actually care then?

Evil Ted wrote:

rinks wrote:

still wrote:'Cheap at half the price'. Well it would be!

It's meant to be "cheap at twice the price". Saying it the other way round is a sarcastic way of saying something's expensive, but people are stupid and ended up using the wrong one. (EDIT: Not directed at you!)

Actually, it really is "cheap at half the price", and "cheap at twice the price" is the misunderstanding. The word "cheap" used to mean something different.

OK, didn't know that. Cheers.

It's still stupid, though.

rinks wrote:

Evil Ted wrote:

rinks wrote:

still wrote:'Cheap at half the price'. Well it would be!

It's meant to be "cheap at twice the price". Saying it the other way round is a sarcastic way of saying something's expensive, but people are stupid and ended up using the wrong one. (EDIT: Not directed at you!)

Actually, it really is "cheap at half the price", and "cheap at twice the price" is the misunderstanding. The word "cheap" used to mean something different.

OK, didn't know that. Cheers.

It's still stupid, though.

It was kinda stupid originally, yeah. The original phrase basically boils down to "cheap things are cheap".

I'm going to widen the scope of the thread here, partly because I'm a gooseberry fool, and partly because Pete called "Eat lead and die" a proverb.

I found out that Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now", a hit from my youth, was actually a cover version only last week, when I watched 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Again - widening the scope of the thread - I couldn't understand cash points. I spent my early childhood thinking that "Free cash here" by an ATM meant that you could literally just get free money and I couldn't understand why there weren't constantly queues for the free cash.

Still, to this day, can never remember if it's "let alone" or "yet alone"

I used to think it was "can't be asked" and got a massive telling off at school for it until the teacher realised I was just being thick and let me off.

<]:^D wrote:have your cake and eat it

i thought 'have' meant eat your cake so in my head it was eat your cake and eat it

Joer wrote:I used to think it was "can't be asked" and got a massive telling off at school for it until the teacher realised I was just being thick and let me off.

I'm not alone! Though I don't think the second one is really a proverb...

And the cake one couldn't be less clear if they tried! (Because these days have can mean eat. "They" should change it to He wants to keep his cake and eat it. Which is still clunky but the meaning is more clear.)

Also what kind of person has a cake and doesn't eat it?
That's not only wasteful it's rude to the person who baked the cake.

Cake only exists to be eaten .

It used to be the other way round, you can't eat your cake and (still) have it, but it got swapped around for reasons unclear.

Evil Ted wrote:It used to be the other way round, you can't eat your cake and (still) have it, but it got swapped around for reasons unclear.

Igotthatreference.gif

A hot sausage pickles the sun chime.

Rapidly-Greying wrote:A hot sausage pickles the sun chime.

That's a euphemism, no?

I'm also going off on a tangent; Estuary English, why do people train themselves to talk like this and claim it's natural?