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This is most probably why the plural marbles came to be figuratively used to mean mental faculties, common sense, in the phrases to lose one’s marbles, to have (or not have) all one’s marbles, and variants. Who can mistake the meaning of the boy when he had lost his marbles playing “keeps”: “You needn’t say nothing no more to me about no marbles.” use double negatives where one should be used, yet are rarely misunderstood. It sounds like the passionate ravings of a school boy who has lost his marbles at a game of “keeps,” and wishes to charge his schoolfellows with putting up a job and cheating him.Īnother example is from The Use of Double Negatives in English, published in The Hickory Press (Hickory, North Carolina) of 7 th January 1897:
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Wheelock, President of the New Orleans and Pacific Railroad Company.
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#Dont lose your marbles sayings similar how to#
We scarcely know how to characterise the production of Mr. For instance, the following is from The Daily Shreveport Times (Shreveport, Louisiana) of 28 th March 1876: In the late 19 th century, the discomfiture of a boy who has lost his marbles seems to have been to a certain extent proverbial in American English. In the classic game of marbles, the players take turns at shooting their own marble, with finger and thumb, at marbles inside a ring, trying to knock the marbles out of the ring to win them. English peregrine).Ī marble is a little ball made originally of marble and now usually of glass, porcelain, baked clay, etc., used in a children’s game. This Latin noun is from ancient Greek μάρμαρος (= mármaros), shining stone, marble, of uncertain origin, but popularly related to μαρμάρεος (= marmáreos), flashing, gleaming, and μαρμαίρειν (= marmaírein), to sparkle.įrench marbre shows unusual dissimilation of m– m, while English marble shows dissimilation of r– r, as does pilgrim, from Latin peregrinus (cf. Why a person might choose to burn a soak-ing wet thousand-pound mule is anybody’s guess, but the expression was made famous (in some circles) when legendary Louisiana governor Huey Long used it in reference to deep-pocketed nemesis Standard Oil.The noun marble, denoting a hard crystalline metamorphic rock resulting from the recrystallization of a limestone, is from Anglo-Norman forms such as marbre and marbelle, and from Old-French forms such as marbre, maubre and mabre, from classical Latin marmor. The expression describes someone in an extreme state of upset and anxiety, and, of course, it was used by Tennessee Williams as the title of his Pulitzer-winning 1955 play. A haint, in old Southern terminology, is a ghost, and according to tradition, scalding one will send it running right quick.Ĭats are jumpy enough in a comfortable living room. The opposite meaning of the previous phrase. Things don’t get much slower than molasses. “Slower than molasses running uphill in the winter” Most of ten used to denote g rowth, as in: “I haven’t seen you since you were knee-high to a grasshopper!” The expression describes a similarly oblivious (though quite alive) person who smiles away when in reality things aren’t going so hot. As a dead pig’s body lies out in the sunshine, see, its lips begin to pull back from its teeth, creating the illusion of a wide grin. “Grinning like a possum eating a sweet potato”įor a scavenger accustomed to a diet of bugs, slugs, and roadkill, having a fat, juicy sweet potato to gorge on is like winning the lottery.ĭeceptively complex, this one contains a built-in lesson in postmortem porcine physiology.
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As legend has it, Cooter Brown was a man who did not see fit to take up with either side during the Civil War, and so remained so staggeringly drunk throughout the entire conflict that he avoided conscription.