As my granny used to say.....

a face like a well-skelped arse

these are still well in use, well they were when I last resided in the dear green place :(

my grandfather had a strange catalogue of well-worn phrases that tbh ive never heard anyone say so either very archaic and just a bit pish patter so didn't endure (quite likely) or just some idiosyncratic phrases he liked to hit out wi':

half the lies are never true
when youre right rich you can shop in Buchanan street
tony galenti (rhyming slang for plenty)
toffs are careless
that was rotten (invariably said immediately after finishing a particularly good meal)

My sister has just mentioned this one, I don't remember it but then I'm the wrong gender:

Granny Grey Hips - someone behaving older than they are.

Squeegee (sp?) - crooked, awry

e.g., "Ye'll huv tae hing that paintin' up again, it's aw' squeegee".

Also, I noticed when I was up last week, when my mum was trying to get an electrician and I had to talk to them on the phone because she's pretty corned beef these days, that people in Scotland still pronounce the letter J as jy.

My Dad used to tell my sister and I to 'stop your greeting' if we were moaning and/or crying. I think this is a Scots thing.

Was probably fed up with having to deal with pair o' greetin'-faced weans.

my mum and her family and my grandma had a bunch of weird phrases.

"cat's malak" to mean like a horrible mix of something, like eg if you put too much ketchup on your dinner. i thought this was common irish slang but friends don't seem to verify that.

"dol-di-dee" to mean rubbish or something that isn't true. feel like this is more common, in ireland, but dunno.

my dad's main thing he used to say was "DICK MACKESSY WOULDN'T DO THAT" in outraged anger if you did something stupid. when asked about dick mackessy he'd just explain he was like the village fool - "the mackessys were all eejits" but with no real deeper detail than that. i like to imagine dick turning in his grave.

I'm not quite sure how to spell this phonetically, but my grandmother used to call the cupboard under the stairs the "kutch" (
to rhyme with 'butch')

-- C J (CJ_The_Unrul...), November 28th, 2005 1:24 PM. (later)

i wonder if that's a variation on "hutch." (xxpost)

-- athol fugard (theundergroundhom...), November 28th, 2005 1:28 PM. (later)

iirc this is a welsh thing... i can't figure out how to spell it (cwtsi? doesn't look right!) ("si" makes a "sh" or "zh" sound) but as well as cupboard-under-stairs - or any little hidey-hole really - it means a quick cuddle, a little hug. i only remember because someone told me about people being beaten at school for using the word when the english were trying to suppress the welsh (haha, "were").

― emsk ( emsk), Tuesday, 29 November 2005 12:43 (10 years ago)

10 years later, and living on the English/Welsh border, I can confirm emsk is correct only it's spelled cwtch. Most people seem to use it in the sense of when they're under the weather and just want to lie on the sofa in a blanket. "I'm all cwtched up."

Also:

http://media.alesbymail.co.uk/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/t/i/tiny-rebel---cwtch_2.jpg

I'm not quite sure how to spell this phonetically, but my grandmother used to call the cupboard under the stairs the "kutch" (
to rhyme with 'butch')
"Cooch"????

― Dan (Where You Stick The Cucumbers) Perry (Dan Perry), Monday, 28 November 2005 17:14 (10 years ago)

DJP should totally come over here and drink some cooch with me.

footery wee hings

"You'll have to use Shanks's pony."

'He dies in this"

Be back in a minute, just got to ben the other room.

oops

Be back in a minute, just got to go ben the other room.

not really an interesting colloquialism or anything, but when my gran first met my auntie's 2nd husband she whispered to my mum "She better get him insured, he'll be in the ground before me".

He was known as "Yellow Eddie" because he worked at LB Dyes for 30 years and must have been getting all the worst jobs because he literally was yellow and looked quite cadaverous in the best of health. He only died this year funnily enough, beating my gran by 18 years.

Today I sent Dan a photo of a 30ft cwtch.

My grandmother on my mother's side said strange things that never made sense to me. She came from a weird, desiccated Dutch old money family. She told me a story of how her three great aunts were draped in robes and watched her when she was sent off overseas or some bullshit like that.

What the hell is that? I still don't know what the fuck that is. I'll take this folksy crap in a heartbeat.

My granny always called my grandfather (named William, Bill to friends) Wal, rhyming with pal.

From out of nowhere, I remembered a word my dad was fond of using, dighted, which means daft, stupid or crazy. I assume it's from the verb, to dight, which means, among other things, to wipe clean.

Whenever she would arrive home from somewhere, my grandmother would say "Home again, home again, jiggity jig."

I don't say it out loud, but to this day it runs through my head quite often.

Menage (pronounced 'menodge')

http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/menage

Whenever she would arrive home from somewhere, my grandmother would say "Home again, home again, jiggity jig."

It's a line from an old nursery rhyme "To market, to market"

(xp) Apparently from the French, manège, the profitable employment of money.

You may be confusing 'manège' (amusement ride, riding hall, crafty behaviour, etc.) and 'ménage' (housekeeping, relationship).

Yes, I was going by what they said on the site I linked to.

Interesting. The confusion is likely due to the word's phonetic and semantic similarity with 'management'.

Apparently still in use too:

Nowadays this word survives as an observation on how incompetent people or governments manage their affairs as in the following from the Herald of 12th September 2017: “We Scots had lacked confidence in the ability of our leaders and institutions to run a menodge.” This use is further illustrated, again from the Herald in the letters page of 12th November 2015: “As we say in the west of Scotland, could this lot manage a menodge.”

Manage a menodge, nice phrase.

Heh, that's awesome. It kind of makes sense too, since 'manage' and 'ménage' ultimately stem from two separate Latin roots: manus (the hand) and maneo (to stay, to dwell), respectively. So to manage a menodge is in some sense to handle a dwelling.

Not my granny but my mum, but she probably got it from her granny:

Sleeping your head into train oil or, as my mum would say, "Ye'll sleep yer heid intae train oil".

This one really used to confuse me because, in Scots, oil is pronounced like 'isle', so I had no idea where this place Train Isle was or how you could sleep yourself into it.

And even when I'd figured out it was 'oil' and not 'isle', I was still none the wiser, I mean what is train oil? Oil for lubricating trains? And, again, how do you sleep yourself into it? But, it turns out that train oil is whale oil - which your brain will turn into if you sleep too long.

My dad used that one a lot but it was more like "listening to that'll turn your brain to train oil", or "your brain'll turn to train oil if you keep on watching that". He would have been talking about stuff like the Boomtown Rats and Rentaghost so probably OTM.

'train oil' was most likely in the form of a greasy sludge

I thought it was 'dod' but apparently it's 'daud'.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/daud

... as in "Gie's a daud o' that bread".

Not really grannyspeak because I say it myself, but only in my head, as no-one else would know what I was talking about.

"Gie's a daud o' that bread"

iirc one of the Apostles says that in Billy Connolly's 'Crucifixion' routine

LOL that must have been deep in the memory banks somewhere.

Sclaff

As in, thank you BBC Scotland for allowing the nation to once again relive Billy Bremner sclaffing that ball wide of the post against the worst Brazil team in history in the '74 World Cup.

My mom's golf group was called the Sclaffers.

had no idea it was an actual word that other people used!

Yes, it's used a lot in golf!

Along with skite.

I sclaffed my shot and it skited off a tree

and skliff

I sclaffed my shot and it skited off a tree so I skliffed off to find the ball

I think that just means a segment of an orange where I'm from.

I use sclaff. I have not heard skite or skliff. But I have used skiff - to very barely hit something. Usually in Subbuteo or pool. "That's two shots." "Naw, I skiffed it."

Oh yeah, skiff is another one. Surprised you haven't heard skite, it's quite a common one.

Michael Rosen’s Twitter feed has an absolute treasure trove of these that he either retweeted right before going into hospital or someone in his family RTed for him

i.e.

"I'm standing 'ere like cheese at fourpence......."

— David Setchell (@DGSetchell) March 27, 2020

Puggled = exhausted, spent, on your last legs.

"Huv seen the state o' yon Boris Johnson? Looks puggled tae me".

Switch = to beat (eggs) or mix.

"Gie's that egg and ah'll switch it up in a cup fer ye."

Clap = to pat affectionately, caressingly, approvingly.

"Ye can gie the dug a clap, he'll no' bite ye."

these are so great.