UKC

Are there any sayings or phrases you just didn't understand as a child? 

For me it was "people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"

As Glasshouses was a nearby village i never know why the people there shouldn't throw stones 

Not a saying, but a German friend told me that as a teenager he never understood why Bob Marley would sing about "The Damp Chanson"

I've got a memory of being very young, and  at the stage where I was just starting to learn how to read.  The sign on the door of our local shop said "No dogs allowed (except guide dogs)" and I remember reading it as "except good dogs".  

Which actually made perfect sense to me at the time.

When I did my Cycling Proficiency test at the age of 7 I learned my Highway Code roadsigns really well and knew the whole lot off by heart, including one which highlighted restrictions for moped riders. I had asbolutely no idea what a moped rider was (I thought 'moped' was a one syllable adjective describing the rider). I was terrified that I was going to be asked that roadsign in my test. Fortunately as it had nothing to do with cycling, it didn't crop up.

At a later age I learned what a mo-ped was.

I could never understand why you couldn't have your cake and eat it! I mean, what was the use of having cake if you couldn't eat it!!

I used to sing "A wean in a manger" at Christmas as a kid, which made perfect sense since I lived in Scotland. At the age of 9 I moved to Devon and they still sung the same song but they didn't know what a wean was! When I actually read the words "away in a manger" they made no sense at all (and still don't really). Still prefer my childhood version

I used to think ‘when the going gets tough the tough get going’ had the opposite meaning ie. when things get difficult, ‘tough guys’ run away. 

Looking at Wikipedia, it’s not a unique opinion - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_going_gets_tough,_the_tough_get_go...

This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you.

I remember being told about 'fishers of men' in Sunday school when I was about 5.  I wondered about how many men that would be and what an odd name it was for a collective noun.

Blimey, I've always thought that was what it meant?!?!?

Like "When the situation gets bad, all those apparently tough people aren't really tough after all and run away"

A rather earnest headmaster at primary school used to give moralistic lectures once a week at assembly. I was confused for years by the topic one week 'If the cat fits, wear it". How does one wear a cat? Why would you want to?

The people from the East coast of Scotland would have been similarly non plussed as to what a wean was!

When a kid is crying and the Mother/Father would shout 

"Shut up or I will give you something to greet about"

My father was good at sarcasm, he used to say 'What do you want ? A letter' when he had to ask me for the fifth time to do something, I didn't really get it until he actually wrote me a letter telling me to tidy my bedroom !

Jason

It took me many years to learn the literal meaning of "Woe betide you" but I got the gist of it well before that.

In your defence, the popular phrase is a corruption of the "you can't EAT your cake AND still HAVE it"

You learn something new every day!!

Not sure why the phrase 'you can't eat your cake and have it' isn't more popular. Almost as easy to say as the popular and more easily understandable.

Exactly what I always thought too!

"We plough the fields and scatter" used to puzzle me a bit - why the need to do a runner after doing a good day's work?

Not me, but it made me laugh... “Knowledge is power. France is bacon”.

https://www.thepoke.co.uk/2019/04/15/literary-misunderstanding-resurfaced-g...

"You can't do that"

"You better behave or you'll be for the high jump".

Made me very wary of 'athletics' as an summer term option in secondary school.

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My sister heard that as "vicious old men", which amuses our family to this day

I never understood 'Dilute to taste' on bottles of squash because I could taste it even before it had been diluted. I was never sure if the grocer was waternig it or I had some kind of taste superpower that no one else had

Similar misunderstanding by me but with the opposite reasoning. I thought “dilute” must mean “bloody horrible and far too strong” 

Tear along this line - for all those ants perusing the labels.

I couldn't understand why Jesus wanted the little children to suffer...

Obviously a rider who has been moping...

Two things I recall from when I was a kid.

"A man is helping police with their enquiries" - I imagined some public spirited volunteer going door to door asking if anyone had seen something untoward.

"Urban guerillas" - I lived in an urban area and this scared the bejesus out of me, because I'd always thought that gorillas were confined to Africa and zoos.

My mum once found it very amusing when I asked her what "Bicker-bone-ate of sodder" was.

My grandmother, aged about 5, read a sign in the fishmongers' and asked my great-grandmother why "God slices Haddocks"

My gran used to say "Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs!", when exclaiming about something or nothing, which baffled me lots because she lived in a bungalow. 

The Italian version of this is wonderful "You can't have your wine barrel full and your wife drunk"!

When my mum used to say: "Why don't you look where you're going!" I couldn't work out how staring hard at my feet while walking would help me stop bumping into things...

"...the evil of good, is better."

Black over Bills mother.

I had an Uncle Bill 

She was my grandma.

She didn't live over there.

Not a childhood thing but this one always makes me laugh.

Signs for "Sheep dog trials". why? what have they done wrong?

Common in Wales in summer.

Slightly different, I remember seeing some sort of advert for people who had a drinking problem and feeling very sorry that their taps weren’t working or were faulty.  My whole family dissolved into laughter around me.

cheers

Toby

As a kid I thought the Hulking Stone Rangers (Eddie Waring commentary) were obviously a really tough team.

"Too many cooks spoil the broth." "Many hands make light work."

For me it was what is the benefit of the doubt?

'Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy & wise'

And miss out on all the fun?

In the words of my Yorkshire Dales born Grandma,  "by, she's brazen fond that one". Always intrigued me, but I got the general gist.

"Gladly, the cross eyed bear" 

On vaguely related note, I remember being very alarmed to hear on the news that marshal law had been declared in Walsall. My grandad was from there originally and my dad still supported the team! I can't remember how I eventually twigged that Tim Sebastian was reporting for the BBC from the capital of Poland, not other side of the Black Country from where I lived in Worcestershire.

Grandmothers are great . It took me a long time to work out that “nigger brown” basically meant “quite dark brown”.

Slight context, my mother is from South East Asia and is fairly light brown; the “nigger brown” comment came from white Yorkshire grandmother...confusing times for a kid ! 

Nigger brown is (or more probably now, was) the official school uniform colour of Heckmondwike Grammar School. 

The saying "It'll be cracking the flags" when it's very hot

how do you crack something flappy and made of cloth?

Flagstones.

For a while I didn’t understand why John Lennon thought the world could be a swan.

I know that now but it took a while, especially as I lived in a village with tarmac pavements (now there's a contradiction in terms!)

I thought I understood the phrase "nineteen to the dozen" as meaning going, or talking, very fast - but now there seems to be "ten to the dozen"  meaning, I think, the same thing. This is very confusing...

well this is very confusing, I've heard neither phrase! 

Twenty to the dozen is the phrase I've heard of, usually to describe speed of motion, talking or performing a task. But mostly the preserve of a previous generation and the generation prior to that, in rural County Durham. 

Google suggests 19 and 10 exist but a lot of confusion and discussion about 10. 

To me 10 to the dozen seems like "almost top speed", or another form of "most" (someone perhaps on the thread I link, mentions black cats being ten to the dozen, but only as their own hypothetical example based on a similar interpretation). 

This thread claims an interesting etymology for nineteen to the dozen. 

https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/nineteen-to-the-dozen.1715514/

These phrases are a dime a dozen nowadays!

"the exception that proves the rule".    I didn't know then that proves means "tests" in this usage.

I rather think that it is not used with this knowledge by many who use it.

first day at infant school, Lanchester, 1960, I was given what I thought was a tin of "pastilles" by the teacher which I much looked forward to opening to eat.  Sadly disappointing to find they were a scruffy assortment of wax crayons.

In the old days they were ten a penny...

My grandpa had some lovely sayings :

”an apple without cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze”

Class 

I recall being very puzzled and perturbed by a sign in a lift saying "Do not use lift in case of fire". I thought it meant don't use the lift in case you start a fire. Why do you even have lifts then you crazy place?

I took the stairs, congratulating myself on my wisdom.

I am confused, aren't pastels a bit more chalky? Or was there a brand of wax crayon called "Pastel" (this is ringing a very vague bell)? Or have I (or someone else) very much misunderstood something?

Here's one that I still don't understand

"Stand-up comic/comedian"

Is it a literal thing to distinguish them from a raconteur who would more usually be seated, or is it a play-on-words of some sort (cf "he's a really stand-up guy" meaning "he's a good and reliable person")? If the latter, I don't get it?
I am not saying that such a qualifier is redundant (you would describe Morecambe and Wise as comedians after all)

Hang on I think the penny has just dropped, with my previous sentence. D'oh!

well it was 1960 - that should make you suspect my analysis of what was in the tin on grounds both of my age 4 and my memory.  Plus a degree of uncertainty about whether the teacher was being precise in her description rather than somewhat generic.  (Miss Errington)

The older kids around me in assembly used to lustily sing 'So wank the Lord, oh wank the Lord for he-ee-ee is good!' This really confused me and I remember thinking 'that can't be right...'

Elbow grease !

On April fools day whilst on a residential trip with school when I was around 10’years old, a teacher asked me to go and fetch some elbow grease of mr Smith as we were doing cleaning chores after breakfast. I went to mr smith who then sent me onto another teacher saying he didn’t have any, this teacher then sent me to the manager of the residential house we were staying in where the joke ended !

Bookmark always threw me as a child:

'This is a bookmark.'
'Don't be silly grandma, that isn't a book.'

My wife took our young daughter to the nurse to get her clogged ear rinsed out. When our daughter saw the result she exclaimed "Look at that big whack!" She thought wax was plural of whack.

"A Bird in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush"

Never understood why this was said .

Surely you could just keep the one in your hand and go get the other two if so inclined.

Then you've got 3 birds in your hands

As a small child I was very puzzled when told to ‘pull my socks up’ as they were already up. 

and what was all that talk of being "wet behind the ears"?

I used to think that when a football team had won on aggregate, they'd played the game on a gravel pitch..

I must admit it's one of my favourite metaphors. The moral being if you go for the 2 in the bush you will lose the one in your hand and end up with nothing at all. A very valuable life lesson in the dangers of wanton greed.

Yes I realize that as an adult but as a small child.i just didn't get the meaning.  Why did you have to drop one in the hand. 

Sounded odd at the time . 

One I tried not to understand was "Little children should be seen but not heard".

Last week I found our 3 Yr old sat half naked on the kitchen floor looking suspiciously at his pants. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was looking for ants. It turned out Mrs. X at nursery had told him off for wriggling and asked him if he had `ants in his pants' and he wanted to see if they were still there. 

Most of the parables in the New Testament puzzled me throughout childhood: nice stories but didn't seem to stand up to even gentle scrutiny. The ambivalence of the messages continued to bother me until recently when I head a Radio 4 series on some of the more well known ones and it appeared that no-one was really sure what they meant.

"A stitch in time saves nine".  I couldn't fathom how one made a stitch in the fabric of time.

"Blood is thicker than water".  No it's not they are about the same thickness aren't they?

The reply to 'Whats for dinner?' being 'wait and see'.  I used to think Waite and Cee was a  firm of food manufacturers or some other brand name.

"Blood is thicker than water"-only if you add cornflour (Spike Milligan)

I didn't make sense to me until a few years ago, I always thought "an exception would disprove the rule, not prove it?!" Now I understand it to mean the "exception which suggests the generality", such as "no parking on Sundays" means you can park on Monday-Saturday.

Do I understand it now??

"Don't throw the baby out with the bath water"

Why say this ?

I don't recommend anyone throwing babies anywhere. 

Sounds like it!

Not quite a saying, and in fairness I think my confusion was totally reasonable on this point....but for years I wondered what was inherently “evil” about an American man on a motorbike jumping over buses.