Inspired by Anatoly Liberman's Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms (which I've reviewed for the International Journal of Lexicography), here's a quick dip into some ways of saying one's going to bed, where they've come from and who uses them now.
to Bedfordshire
Bedfordshire, a county north of London, has been a humorous synonym for bed since the 17th century.
Here's what the OED has (in an entry last edited in 1887):
Humorously put for bed.
- 1738Faith, I'm for Bedfordshire., Complete Collection of Genteel Conversation 214
1665
Each one departs to Bedford-shire And pillows all securely snort on.
, Scarronnides 19
This seems not to have made any inroads to AmE. Here are go to Bedfordshire and off to Bedfordshire in Google Books. Of course some of them might literally be about going to the county where Luton Airport is, but it's pretty likely that most are the idiom.
Hit the hay
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| From Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (via Bad Robot) |
Though still more used in AmE, hit the hay is no longer foreign to BrE.
Hit the sack
Sack was a synonym for bed much earlier than hay (1829 first citation). The OED says of sack:
(a) A hammock; a bunk; (b) a bed; frequently as the sack; to hit the sack: see hit v. II.11c. slang (chiefly U.S.; originally Navy).
Hitting the sack doesn't show up in citations till 1943, though, so it was probably influenced the use of hit in other expressions like hitting the hay. Its US/UK usage pattern looks much like hit the hay's:
When we were children in the 50s it was ‘up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire’
ReplyDeleteI remember my maternal grandmother saying that in the sixties, although it was sometimes "up the apples and pears to Bedfordshire".
DeleteA song called "Up the Wooden Hill to Bedfordshire" was Vera Lynn's first solo record in 1936, perhaps giving that longer form a boost in popularity.
DeleteAs children in SE London, we would go up the apples and pears to see Uncle Ted (rhyming slang).
DeleteYes, that's where my grandparents lived.
Delete"Up the dancers" was what my father called it.
DeleteDancers = Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire(s) = Stairs.
Dancing bears = stairs.
DeleteI wonder when/where "crash" started being used for "go to bed/lie down" as in "I gotta go crash" or "and then she crashed (out)"
ReplyDelete"Crash (out)" (go to sleep) and the associated "crash pad" (place to sleep) reached the US in the 1960s, according to Green's Dictionary of Slang and the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. Green has a citation from 1945 in Australia, and says "orig. from RN [Royal Navy] sl. crash the swede, to sleep; as such it migrated first to Aus. then to US and finally back to UK". (Here "swede", i.e. turnip, stands for one's head.)
DeleteI wonder, though, if the connection to older military slang is really certain. It seems like something that could very easily be reinvented independently.
comment-catching comment
ReplyDelete"Hitting the hay" and "Rolling in the hay" mean two very different things to me!
ReplyDeleteOf course they do!
DeleteIn the post: "Of course some of them might literally be about going to the county where Luton Airport is, but it's pretty likely that most are the idiom."
ReplyDeleteBut that's not a safe assumption; you can click through from the ngram to the actual search results, and for the phrase "go to Bedfordshire", most of them are literally traveling to literal Bedfordshire, and most of the rest are dictionaries or idiom collections. The graph is so lumpy because the numbers are so low; the phrase is in the classic novel Pamela (used literally) and a lot of the hits are editions of the novel. That's what makes the spike at 1902, for example.
For "off to Bedfordshire", the results are mostly the idiom, but they're still very few and around half are dictionaries and the like.
I don't think the ngrams visualization is a good tool when the signal is barely above the noise like this. Another way to show that the idiom didn't survive in the US could be the Corpus of Historical American English, which can only scrape up two hits on "to Bedfordshire", both of which treat the idiom as unfamiliar and needing explanation.
Thanks, I did also use GloWbE, where I got beddy results, but chose this time to use the prettier graphs. For some reason I'm not being informed of comments for this post!
DeleteHave you tried an RSS feed reader? There's a comment feed on this blog and it still works perfectly for me; see my comment at the "making and taking decisions" post.
DeleteThis is really interesting, particularly as someone who grew up in a neighbouring country but has literally never heard the expression "going to Bedfordshire" before. Is it used more in any specific region of the UK?
ReplyDeleteI know the expression from reference books, but I've hardly ever heard it in actual use (if at all). I'm from Derbyshire.
DeleteI don't think it's regionally limited. We didn't use it in our family so that's a caution about my intuition, but someone I know who does use it (in the long form 'up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire' is an Irish colleague and her husband from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, both of which are far from Bedfordshire, in the UK sense of 'far'.
DeleteIncidentally, I'm reminded of something Mark Steel said on a Radio 4 programme a few years ago. Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire has such a large lesbian community that "going to Hebden Bridge" had become synonymous with coming out, which could lead to confusion if someone actually was travelling there.
ReplyDeleteA bit like 'Does the young man speak Greek?' for 'Is the young man / Are you gay?'--which, I get the impression, is a bit dated, but would be subject to the same kind of confusion.
DeleteIn the US that would be "He's playing for the other team." :)
DeleteMy grandmother, who grew up and lived in various places across the English midlands, used to talk about 'going to Bedfordshire.' But no one else in our family used the expression.
ReplyDeleteI'm in Australia but one I used to hear a lot was 'going to the blanket show'. I remember it really confusing my sister when she was about 4 or 5 years old as there was a Circus over the road and she thought my Dad meant he was going to take her to the circus.
ReplyDeleteMy mother used to say that when I was little, in the context of “It’s too late to be playing games. The only game you should be playing is Blanket Show”.
ReplyDeleteAnother Bedfordshire idiom, now-dead, is to use the word 'Dunstable' as a synonym for plain or ordinary. It is from the road from London to Dunstable, which is Watling Street, a straight Roman road.
ReplyDeleteHitting the hay in the US had to do with ‘mattresses’ being literally made of hay. It was used by my grandmother (Michigan, USA) and my grandfather (Nevada, USA)
ReplyDelete