Saw this sentence with both the Irish English "give out" and a standardized-English "give out":

"The banks often give out¹ that the rules are too tight and they can’t give out² the money people need."

¹ complain
² issue, distribute

Source and commentary: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/giving-out-irish-style/

#language #dialect #idioms #IrishEnglish #EnglishUsage #phrases

“You’ll Have Had Your Tea”: the thread about a press fabrication of a popularised myth

This thread was originally written and published in May 2023.

In June 1983, the City of Glasgow launches its fondly remembered “Glasgow’s Miles Better” advertising slogan, as seen below in curious company with Margaret Thatcher. This confident, cheerful self-promotion of the City is something that Glasgow seems much more comfortable and at home with than Edinburgh and its more recent, insipid, uninspiring, cringeworthy attempts like “Inspiring Capital” or “Incredinburgh“.

Of course if you focus-grouped a sample of self-respecting Glaswegians on what Edinburgh’s slogan should be, you would likely find “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” in amongst the responses. As any resident of that City will tell you, in Glasgow they’ll ask you if you want to come in for your tea, in Edinburgh you’ll get the former cold response. Which all got me thinking… (you know where this is going now, don’t you?) Just where and when does the phrase/jibe “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” come from?

Now, if you’ll Google this for yourself you’ll find what I consider to be an incredulous claim that it originates with Mackintosh of Borlum of all characters, in 1729. If you don’t know the story of the eccentric Brigadier, it’s worth a refresh. By 1729, he was an ageing Jacobite has-been, noted for his spectacular military derring-do in the 1715 rebellion, matched only by his incompetence as a leader. By 1729 the septugenarian warrior lived in captivity in Edinburgh under bond. It is claimed that our hero tired of being offered the faddish new drink of tea, which he found weak and effeminate, and so went around informing his hosts that he had “had his tea” in order that he could instead move straight on to a harder, manlier drink.

Indeed, Mackintosh *does* write of tea in some disgust in 1729. He even writes the phrase “I am now asked if I have had my tea“. Case closed. Right? But the problem is, those 10 words are only a cherry-picked selection of what he fully wrote and without the rest, the context of what he was complaining about is gone and the meaning changes. What he wrote was, firstly:

• “Formerly I had been served with two or three substantial dishes of beef, mutton and fowl, garnished with their own wholesome gravy. I am not served up little expensive ashets with English pickles, Indian mangoes and anchovy sauces“

And secondly:

• “When I come to a friend’s house of a morning, I used to be asked if I had had my morning draught yet. I am now asked if I have had my tea and in lieu of the big quaich with strong ale and toast, and after a dram of good wholesome Scots spirits, there is now the tea-kettle put to the fire, the tea-table and silver and china equipage brought in, and marmalade and cream“

So what Borlum is actually complaining about is not about the coldness of his reception in Edinburgh, it’s quite the opposite – it’s all too nice. He is discontent that in the post-Union, Georgian capital of “North Britain”, Scottish culinary culture has been changed and gentrified by English influences and. Gone are hearty meat and drink, and in are delicate teas, condiments, scones and pleasantries. He is not being asked “You’ll have had your tea” so that his hosts don’t have to give him any, he’s being asked so that they can serve him the latest trends in conversational dining and drinking, and are most insistent on giving them to him even if he’d rather drink and belch!

That Googled explanation just doesn’t ring true – so how did it come to be on the internet as “fact”? If you read it on the internet it must be true, yes? Where does the source of this spurious claim originate? The earliest I can trace it back to is a single unreferenced line in an anonymous compendium of Edinburgh “facts” (many of them demonstrably dubious) on the Scotsman website some 20 years ago. Much of what is in the list is true, but an not insignificant amount is either not or is wishful thinking.

The following year, London-based travel writer Benedict Le Vay included a variation of this explanation in his book “Eccentric Edinburgh“, a travel-guide to the city from the “Eccentric” series by Chalfont St. Peter-based publisher Bradt Travel Guides. This series is a light-hearted “insiders guide” to cities, trying to find their “hidden corners and spooky stories” that others guides don’t cover. So it’s not a reference work by any stretch of the imagination, and ofference no provenance for this explanation.

The Mackintosh of Borlum trail goes cold for about a decade, resurfacing in the Scotsman’s online sister publication “i” in the best traditions of Johnston Press churnalism. The unverified story has now established itself as “fact”, and now propagates itself through blogs and social media with the respectable sounding references pointing (in good faith) to two newspapers (which should know better) and a well-selling travel book from an established author and publisher.

So if that is what the origins of “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” are not, then what are they? Well, the earliest I can find the phrase in print is in 1938, used by the sports journalist, columnist, playwright and comedic author and poet Albert Mackie, who had a particular love of vernacular patter. Edinburgh born and bred, but often working in Glasgow, he wrote a light-hearted essay entitled “The Pleasures of Edinburgh” in a book – called simply “Scotland” – edited by J. R. Allan and released to coincide with the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow in 1938.

But Mackie was not writing here in jest at his home city, rather in defence of it. He was pointing out that “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” was exactly the sort of jibe that a Glaswegian would come up with in their never-ending mission to let the whole world know they are the friendliest people on the planet. But we can’t credit him with conjuring the saying itself – only writing it down – as it’s clearly an established and recognised phrase at that time in Scotland by the way he refers to it. However I cannot find it printed before then in books or newspapers.

Of course, there are other cities in Scotland beyond Edinburgh and Glasgow (not that the denizens of either of those places would have you believe it), and the phrase pops up again next in the Dundee Courier in 1945, in a jokes column entitled “Heard on the Tram“, but with the butt of the joke extended to Aberdonians.

In 1953, the football writer Tom Nicholson – another son of Edinburgh – brought the saying up again in a Daily Record column called “Tom Nicholson Accuses / Charles Shankland Replies” where the form was for the pair to have amusing arguments over sport and Edinburgh vs. Glasgow relations. It appears intermittently thereafter in print, particularly in Glasgow’s Daily Record / Sunday Mail. In 1970 the latter’s columnist, novelist Jan Webster (1924-2002), attributed it to Scottish women in general as a phrase used when guests were being politely told not to stay too long. In 1978, Record writer Max Hodes published it in his “Official Scottish Joke Book“. Hodes wrote “funnies” for the paper and like Tom Nicholson and Albert Mackie, was an Edinburgh man, writing for a Glasgow publication. So perhaps the joke is really on Glasgow given it is Edinburgh men who popularised it in their papers.

It is’t just comedy writers who have imortalised the phrase however; the autobiographies of the prominent figures of Sir Ludovic Kennedy (1990) and Ian Hamilton KC (1994, who as a law student in 1950 was one of the gang who liberated the Stone of Destiny from Westminster back to Scotland) both use the phrase with a fondness when recalling their time in Edinburgh. Nevertheless the saying continues to pop-up endlessly in coffee table books about Edinburgh and Scottish culture, such as “Edinbuggers vs. Weegies” by Ian Black of 2003, which goes as far as suggesting a more modern ending to it (and who really actually says “Edinbuggers” anyway?)

A more outlandish – and even more improbable than Mackintosh of Borlum – provenance for the saying is Reginald Hill, who controversially attributes the saying to Yorkshire in one of his “a “Dalziel and Pascoe” novels! But – in print at least – he seems to be the only person making this particular claim. Most unusually, it has come to my attention (thank you to Al McVittie for this insight) that the phrase “You’ll Have Had Your Tea” appears in a 1974 episode of the childrens’ TV show Bagpuss, featuring Hamish the tartan pincushion and Tavish McTavish.

The saying was revitalised and spread to a wider audience in the 1990s and noughties by Graeme Garden (an Aberdonian) and the late, great, Barry Cryer in their “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue” improv characters Hamish and Dougal, who always open their sketches with the saying. This resulted in a spin-off series called, imaginatively, “You’ll Have Had Your Tea“. The basic characters apparently date back to 1979, which coincidentally was when the Oxford Theatre Group ran a late-night Fringe review show in Edinburgh called… “You’ll Have Had Your Tea!“

So there isn’t any one, definitive source of this saying. It was definitely popularised and a recognised part of inter-city rivalry by the time it was first put in print in 1938 and Edinburgh men writing in the Scottish press kept it alive thereafter. But I can categorically state that it was not Mackintosh of Borlum who gave us the saying back in 1729 and if anything this is a salutary lesson in the dangers of unreferenced, anonymous “listicles” being published and republished by seemingly reputable sources and crystallising over time into hard “facts”.

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Si quieres ir rápido, camina solo; si quieres llegar lejos, camina acompañado~proverbios africanos 🪮

#phrases #frssesmastodon #lunesliterarios

Lyrical / contextual / regional / accuracy question:
If I use the phrase "gone off my/her head" in song lyrics as a person from Kansas, USA, is that going to be incomprehensibly British to my "average" listener (which is zero people, I know that, ok, I just crave CLARITY) or at best seem pretentious and jarringly out of place / context?

Yea, yea, I know. Who cares.
I care about these things.
There's no excuse for sloppiness or ineffability just for the sake of "cleverness."

"Platty joobs", "genny lec", "menty b" & co.: I wrote about this British slang fad
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2026/02/10/dont-have-a-menty-b-about-this-bloggy-p/

#slang #language #words #phrases #hun #linguistics #wordplay

Don’t have a menty b about this bloggy p

An open linguistic question was raised recently on Bluesky by Darach Ó Séaghdha: What do we call those cutesie slang phrases that have become productive in the UK lately, like genny lec for ‘general election’ and menty b for ‘mental breakdown’?

In response I wrote a short thread, which I already disagree with. So I’ll pick up the discussion here on Sentence first, where there’s more room, it’s easier to find, and it’s probably less ephemeral than on social media.

We can show this linguistic fad as having two main stereotyped patterns or formulas, which overlap morphologically. For type 1, we take a word or short phrase, clip (i.e., truncate, abbreviate) the first stressed syllable, add a y-suffix, and reduce the next word or stressed syllable to its initial letter:

mental breakdown → menty b
nervous breakdown → nervy b
a hundred percent → hundy p
tomato ketchup → tommy k
sauvignon blanc → savvy b
ChatGPT → chatty g
lockdown → locky d
pandemic → panny d
Clapham Junction → Clappy J

For type 2, we clip the first stressed syllable, add a y-suffix (same as type 1 so far), clip the next word or stressed syllable, and, optionally, add an s-suffix:

general election → genny lec/lex
cost of living / cost-of-living crisis → cozzy/cozzie livs
platinum jubilee → platty jubes/joobs
king’s coronation → corrie nash
bank holiday → banny hols
state funeral → statey funes

You may not have seen or heard any of these. They’re still fairly restricted demographically, and are perhaps more spoken than written – and written only in very informal contexts – but if you search for them you’ll find examples.

I’m sure a linguist could formulate them better, but you get the idea. There’s minor variation, but there are clear core patterns. And a phrase can sometimes fit either type: panny dems and platty j also work and indeed are in use. How fun or satisfying they are to say is likely also a factor.

When a phrase can’t go either way, it may be because the result is semantically opaque or ambiguous, e.g., menty breaks suggests mental break(s) more than mental breakdown. Type 1s seem not to favour initial letters with zero onset (i.e., starting with a vowel sound): no cozzy ells or statey effs. But the sample size is small, so that may not hold up.

‘Have you heard the phrase “genny lec”?’ BBC vox pop, 2 July 2024

So what exactly is this phenomenon?

It’s slang and wordplay, for starters – but of a specific kind. The repeated formula (multiple clipping + y– or s-suffixation) made me wonder at first if it’s a snowclone – a kind of phrasal template that’s customizable for reuse (X is the new Y; X 2.0). But a snowclone needs to be a cliché first, and that’s not the case here.

The formula is productive, though – you can coin these phrases at will, as @matthewcba does in a TikTok video with the comically improbable mitty circs ‘mitigating circumstances’. (The video also includes simple clippings like Ab Fab and profesh.)

In the UK Independent in August 2024, Madeline Sherratt referred to the pattern as ‘cringe lingua’ and cited slang expert Tony Thorne’s belief that it

derives from the online “hun” generation – a subculture lampooned on Mumsnet that runs rampant with the frivolous and facetious use of “gorg” and “mwah” when typing furiously on WhatsApp – an etymological by-product of the “live, laugh, love” philosophy.

It extends to the humble “jackie p” (jacket potato) with a squirt of “tommy k” (tomato ketchup) on top – a money-saving meal when everything is so “spenny” (expensive) . . .

Such phrases are attributed to this broadly millennial subculture, which involves making silly jokes online. Those who subscribe to it, Thorne says, tend to be white, young, and upper-working-class to lower-middle-class women.

He said: “The online phrases such as ‘platty jubes’ and ‘savvy b’ mock the formal language that oppresses us, and we see this with young people when they move into the world of work and professionalism.”

Hun culture is something I was only marginally aware of. But I’m not surprised the fashion is driven by young women, given their place at the vanguard of so much linguistic innovation. The examples I’ve listed are all relatively new, as far as I know, but there are plenty of forerunners from various domains, including personal names.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was popularly known as Jackie O. Mickey D’s (Maccy D’s, etc.) for McDonald’s emerged in the 1970s as US Black and campus slang. An Aussie was reported on Bluesky to have called Christmas decorations ‘Chrissie Decs’ in the 1990s. Sunny Delight rebranded as SunnyD decades ago. Okey-doke has been dated to the 1930s. I’m sure you can think of others.

The recent wave of phrases are from a particular, interrelated set of sources, say the linguists who’ve researched them. Christian Ilbury confirmed to me that some are from or are associated with hun culture in the UK; his 2022 paper ‘U Ok Hun?: The digital commodification of white woman style’ includes examples of the type discussed here, including cocky t’s ‘cocktails’.

Pavel Iosad told me that his colleague Patrick Honeybone

has studied a version of pattern 2 in Liverpool (truncation + y-suffixation + some segmental effects, eg Sefton Park > Sevvy) and he dubbed it (Scouse) diddification, which I think is a glorious name that we should adopt.

Honeybone also refers to the process as ‘diddificating truncation’, alluding again to P. Diddy, and provides a one-page summary here [edit: see my update at the bottom]. At first I thought another rapper, Cardi B, fitted the pattern, but that name is a reworking of Bacardi.

The UK may be the hotspot of this slang, but Australians, as we’ve seen, are also on board. They do love their clippings and hypocorisms. Cozzie livs was Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year in 2023, and I recently saw an Australian call the tennis player Elena Rybakina ‘Lenny Baks’, a great example that shows the name’s stress pattern.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdZS8txmzSw?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&w=450&h=254]

Some people find these phrases twee, stupid, or insensitive. Even the Financial Times said that cozzie livs ‘only compounds the misery’ of the cost-of-living crisis. Some of the phrases may aim, in part, to make light of difficult or stressful subjects, to dull or reclaim their power. This is a specialty of slang. But they won’t win everyone over, and that, too, is as it should be.

In January 2023, Serena Smith’s ‘investy g’ for Dazed magazine tied them to a literary tradition of creative silliness, citing Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Sincere use of these phrases ‘misses a crucial element’, she wrote; ‘the cringiness, the tackiness, the ridiculousness is part of the fun’.

I neither love nor loathe them. I’d never used them, even ironically, until this blog post, this bloggy p, but I find them interesting as wordplay. I’d love to hear ideas for what to call them, how else they might be categorized, or how they relate to patterns already formally described or informally conceived (e.g., as a subset of hun lingo).

Suggestions in the replies to Gretchen McCulloch’s post on Bluesky include childish abbreviations or chilly abs, nicky Ns or nicky ens (for ‘nicknames’), clippy comps, and extended hypocoristics. Of these I like Erik Wennstrom’s clippy comps best. A clipped compound could be psyops or sitcom, but clippy comps shows more precisely (because self-referentially) what it refers to. Clippy c’s could be used for type 1.

Another route is to use a popular or prototypical example to refer synecdochically to the set, much as Brianne Hughes uses cutthroats or cutthroat compounds as shorthand for agentive and instrumental exocentric verb-noun (V-N) compounds. This would give us menty b compounds, genny lec phrases, or some such term.

Don’t have a nervy b about it, but if the slang sticks around and there’s a good term for it, it might eventually end up in an esteemed dictionary like Merry Dubs or the Oxy D.

A viral tweet in January 2023 from Depop Drama, now DM Drama, that helped popularize “cozzie livs”.

Update:

A few readers have pointed out that diddification is more likely a reference to Liverpool comedian and entertainer Ken Dodd and his Diddymen puppets, and (having read up on it) I agree. I’ve emailed Honeybone for confirmation and will edit this note when I hear back.

Diddy is a vernacular word for small, probably a nursery pronunciation of little. There’s no entry for this sense in the English Dialect Dictionary, but Wiktionary has a citation from a ballad in 1894 – comfortably antedating the OED’s first citation, from Dodd himself, in 1963.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGor7ZyCawI?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&w=450&h=254]

Australian Shepherd shows incredible smarts using 'talk buttons' to warn family of disaster

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/dog-talking-buttons-ex1

Giving out, Irish style

The phrasal verb give out has several common senses:

distribute – ‘she gave out free passes to the gig’

emit – ‘the machine gave out a distinctive hum’

break down, stop working – ‘at the end of the marathon her legs gave out’

become used up – ‘their reserves of patience finally gave out’

declare, make known – ‘management gave out that it would change the procedure’

In Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale I read an example of this last sense: ‘At the moment the Communist Party is giving out that he was off his head.’ Had Fleming been Irish, this line would be ambiguous – give out in Irish English commonly means complain, grumble, moan; or criticise, scold, reprimand, tell off.

I think this give out comes from Irish tabhair amach, same meaning. It’s intransitive and often followed by to [a person]. People might give out to someone for some mistake, oversight, or character flaw, or about politics, the weather, or the state of the roads. Or they might just give out in an unspecific or habitual way.

Here are some examples from literature:

He always seemed to be in bad humour and was always giving out. (Joe McVeigh, Taking a Stand: Memoir of an Irish Priest)

Pot Belly gives out and tells Slapper he’s not to be going home in this weather. (Claire Keegan, ‘The Ginger Rogers Sermon’, in Antarctica)

She had a good figure, although she was always giving out about her too-tight size twelve jeans, but she said buying a pair of size fourteens would be giving in. (Fiona O’Brien, Without Him)

‘If I eat any more turnips I’ll turn bleedin’ yellow.’
‘Ah, don’t be always giving out,’ said Mother. (Christy Brown, Down All the Days)

Giving out to him the whole time: ‘I’ve hated you for years, you old fecker, so take this.’ (Anne Emery, Obit: A Mystery)

Both brothers would do Mr McGurk’s voice but Tee-J did it brilliant. He did Mr McGurk as a cranky old farmer who was always giving out. (Kevin Barry, ‘White Hitachi’, in Dark Lies the Island)

Greenfinch (Carduelis chloris) giving out to me about something

Irish give out is sometimes intensified by adding stink, yards, spades, to high heaven, or the pay:

Afterwards in the car my mother would give out yards to my father for being so generous to his sponging relations. (Sinead Moriarty, Keeping It In the Family)

Of course you prefer your little pet of a daughter who gave out stink to me this morning and wanted me to shift myself and my bed and I in the throes of mortal suffering. (John B. Keane, Letters of a Love-Hungry Farmer and other stories)

I heard the mother giving out stink to the father about it the other night; she was doing the old shout-whisper… (Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart)

‘I had her mother on the phone to me last night, giving out yards.’ (Clare Dowling, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You)

‘We’re gone fierce boring now. Real suburbanites, I guess. Mowing the lawn and giving out yards about the neighbours.’ (Joseph O’Connor, Two Little Clouds)

For all we know, they give out to high heaven behind closed doors but we’ve no indication of that so we have to presume they are ok with things. (JoeyFantastic on Munsterfans.com forum)

…even if I did have to listen to him giving out the pay about the dangers of the Teddy Boys now inhabiting the place. (Brendan Behan, Confessions of an Irish Rebel)

Bernard Share, in Slanguage, says give out is an abbreviation of give out the hour, and is also seen in the form give off. I haven’t encountered these versions much.

Dermot, she said again, say something. Give off to me but don’t stay quiet. (Dermot Healy, The Bend for Home)

You’ll find give out = complain, criticise, etc. in many dictionaries of Irish slang, but it’s not slang: it’s an idiom in most or all of the dialects on this island, a regular feature of vernacular Hiberno-English. And it doesn’t end there.

On Twitter, Oliver Farry said ‘people in Kansas and Missouri use give out in much the same way as Irish people do’. This was news to me, and I’d be interested to hear more about it – or about its use anywhere else in this Irish sense. Including Ireland: I use it myself. But don’t give out to me if I’ve overlooked something important.

Update:

LanguageHat follows up, wondering about the Kansas/Missouri use of the phrase. A few commenters from these States have never heard it, so its distribution is evidently limited.

Eoin McGee’s book How to Be Good with Money (Gill Books, 2020) has a sentence with Irish English give out ‘complain’ followed by standardized-English give out ‘issue, distribute’:

The banks often give out that the rules are too tight and they can’t give out the money people need.

[Hiberno-English archives]

Words are tasty!

Image from Anarchy Comics no. 1, 1978, edited by Jay Kinney.

For readers unfamiliar with the idiom: eat one’s words means retract what one has said, take back a statement, admit an error. So it’s similar to eating humble pie, whose origins are surprisingly visceral.

“You gotta break an omelet to make an egg”, of course, reverses the natural entropic order, playing with a proverb (“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”) to make a political point. If you’re interested in the comic’s history, here’s a recent interview with Kinney at BoingBoing.

#anarchism #art #comics #eatingWords #eggs #etymology #food #humour #idioms #JayKinney #language #omelette #phrases #politics #proverbs #words