What English language expression do you like the most?

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mustang1

Legendary Member
Location
London, UK
Good morning.
 

PaulSB

Squire
You seem to like our Scottish words. :laugh: Scunnered is another good one. :smile:

I do, I do. My wife is Scottish so I hear a lot. Many are so much more descriptive than the English equivalent. "Dreary" or "dreich." No contest.

It leads to interesting discussions though. "Fir" and "fur." I can't hear or say the difference.
 

Clag

Britain probably has a lot of words for bad weather conditions in the hills. Certainly in places north of Birmingham where there are actually hills worth going up in bad weather!!
 
Get some time back.

This is a common phrase for meetings at work that somehow get done quicker than expected. It is also used as a plea to work through the agenda efficiently to not finish late like most meetings but early!! I actually like it because getting time back means the meeting has taken less time than planned. I always like meetings that last shorter time as I only have a 30 to 45 minute window of concentration in meetings. After that I might actually fall asleep. It has happened, I fell off the chair and woke up!!
 
Wet and warm - as used for a dodgy cup of tea or coffee.

On canoeing trips down rapids in winter we would stop for lunch or at the end. Out would come the stainless steel flasks of hot liquid. I made coffee others had tea. It was always pretty bad drink by that time. If there is a beginner who has taken a few swims one of the experienced would get out his oversized flask and pour a hot drink and shove it in the cold swimmer's hand saying, "here, take this. It is wet and warm!!.

So the phrase "wet and warm" for a hot drink has a comforting connotation to me from my beginner days. I use it myself when I make someone a cup of tea that I think is pretty poor. It is like it was used as an apology for a bad cuppa on the canoeing trips, but when you need it after a swim it changes the cuppa from something you'd throw out to the best cup of coffee or tea you had ever had. In some cases it staved off the beginnings of hypothermia.
 

Profpointy

Legendary Member
Hello big boy.

At work when we were testing a system change or newly written computer programmes, the phrase "fire it up" was often used. Somehow this became "fire it up big boy". It's even become a catch phrase at home for plugging in the DVD drive to watch a film
 
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