I have a soft spot for slightly mangled phrases. I don’t really mind where they come from, as long as they taste good on the tongue and serve well for repetition.
Some come from children – whether one’s own or from others. A good children’s saying is like a fossilised piece of language, fixing a child at a particular age and stage.
So it is that we still say ‘Chicken in a schoo-ool!’ to each other at times, with dire looks in our eyes, and think happily of the young Thomas the Tank Engine enthusiast who narrated it quite so worriedly.
It has reached the stage where we have told Junior Reader where the phrases come from, and now they have new usage, beyond those who were there at the time.
Winnie the Pooh is a good one for multiple-usage phrases, as I have already alluded to. He also gave us ‘crustimoney proseedcake’ (instead of customary procedure), and the famous ‘expotition to dicsover the North Pole’.
But this week, the one sticking in my mind is the Elephant’s Child, in Kipling’s Just So stories, and his ” ‘satiable curtiosity”.
In this case, it is what gets him into trouble – but what also serves to make him distinctive. (Mangled phrases can do that for you.)
I have happy memories of reading this to a certain keen reader who is now too big and grown up to fit on my knee. But I do remember putting our feet up together and revelling in all the wonderful phrases of this tale.
I hope you will too – and you can read the whole story online
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The Elephant’s Child – Rudyard Kipling
“…he lived in Africa, and he filled all Africa with his ‘satiable curtiosities. He asked his tall aunt, the Ostrich, why her tail-feathers grew just so, and his tall aunt the Ostrich spanked him with her hard, hard claw. He asked his tall uncle, the Giraffe, what made his skin spotty, and his tall uncle, the Giraffe, spanked him with his hard, hard hoof. And still he was full of ‘satiable curtiosity!”