Flannel is used in the UK to describe plausible untruths. "You are speaking a load of flannel". "That person's a flanneler".

I believe the expressions were prevalent during the war years.

Hi Umber
I've not come across that saying before....I wonder if its like a saying we have down under "load of old cods wollop"
as in an untrue statement or remark!

hehe I haven't heard that for AGES! Also use it to say how useless people are when doing something or asking them do something for you: "You're worse than a wet flannel", or a bit pathetic "ach, stop being such a wet flannel". Ah the English English language is wonderfully expansive

Candy, I've seen this as one word often enough (Rowling's Rubeus Hagrid is fond of it, for example), but never as two. Is two the fashion down under?

I'm not sure Peter. I hear it often but I don't recall seeing it written.

There doesn't seem to be a definitive answer. It may or may not have started as two words, but its first known appearance in print, second half of 20th century, has it as one word. Here is Michael Quinion's explanation, which should be better than most.

Would in this case flannel be a more civilized equal to bullshit? Umber?

We use something similar though it's mostly used in team sports : "You play like a wet newspaper". Flannel of course has more elegance.

We are by nature, an elegant tongue even if people are beginning to misuse and forget that grammar exists

Or either that or ignoring zombie rules, one.

zombie rules ?!? Oh, please, enlighten me! What a wonderful term, even if it turns out I am one.

What a wonderful term, even if it turns out I am one.

Rules that never die. And, they eat their victim's brain. Or something like that ...

And they're wrong. They never were rules of the English language, just things made up by, usually, some 17th century dude. Things like not splitting infinitives, which for non-restrictive clauses and that for restrictive clauses, not ending a clause with a preposition, not starting a sentence with a conjunction. Stuff like that.

Are there rules for surviving a Zombie attack?

Are there rules for surviving a Zombie attack?

Sure, correct the zombie's grammar. Usually works for me. They stare at you in disbelief and go looking for easier prey. It helps if you can cite the peever who made the rule up out of whole cloth. I have quite a collection of peever books of "rules", although most are available online at Google Books.

Things like not splitting infinitives, which for non-restrictive clauses and that for restrictive clauses, not ending a clause with a preposition, not starting a sentence with a conjunction.

1. to boldly peeve: never have tracked this one down either.

2. that/which hunting: Either Fowler or Strunk-White.

3. not ending a sentence with a preposition: Dryden, who actually went back and "corrected" all his earlier works. Sheesh. Even Robert Lowth didn't believe this one. In the paragraph where he writes about the "rule" he actually ends a sentence with a preposition.

4. conjunctivitis: never have traced this one down.

Your best defense is Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. It's available cheap in real-world book form and online ([url=http://books.google.com/books?id=2yJusP0vrdgC&source[/url]). Chock full of the history of most of these "rules", and if you zombie doesn't respond rationally, you can hit them upside the head with it.

which hunting Good one! [cackle e]

Good one!

I wish it were mine, but alas some other linguoyob came up with it before me.

If you want fertile hunting ground for which hunting try Jonathan Swift's Proposal for Correcting, Improving, & Ascertaining the English Tongue.

You know me, don't you?

For those of y'all not inclined to read the Swift missive, it is essentially a prescriptivist tirade against the devolution of the language. It has forty some odd instances of which being used in a context where modern prescriptivists would demand that be used.

One of my most favourite essays on language and writing was by Orwell, where he complains about academics using big words for the sake of sounding impressive and how you should use small words and always be concise - something I was always told not to be throughout school, as one teacher put it "if you know a longer, larger, bigger word (and one that the examiner may not even know) use it, and they will probably give you more marks for supposedly being intelligent"...I'll try and find a link to it somewhere

ahahaa I have found it, and upon reading it again, my love for Orwell has grown once more Orwell Essay

he complains about academics using big words for the sake of sounding impressive and how you should use small words and always be concise

One should use words appropriate for one's audience and to the context of what one is writing.

of course! I do love the first example he uses, makes me smile every time

I am in total concurence with this viewpoint, zm, and it is my personal intention to, at all times, eliminate all sesquipedalian polysyllabism from my utterances, whether delivered by inscription or by oral means. And I wouldn't dream of starting sentences with conjunctions or using prepositions to end with.

My problem with this essay is unsupported assertion that English is in decline. Orwell gives no evidence that the words and phrases he doesn't like are more common now than they need to be, or more common now than they were in the past. And he makes an unsupported assumption that one's language is a direct link to one's thought, and vice versa.

Agree, it's not in decline. Times are different from Orwell's time. We only have a tiny stroke of babylonism. Internet, advertising, intensive migration all over the globe. It affects all current languages.

Goofy, it was written way back in the forties when all the annoying phrases seemed (to him at least) to be "rearing their ugly heads"...his essay style is true to proper form, being more an intelligent conversation put down in words and in such a way as to make his point most profoundly. Orwell is a great master of essays and the comic and ironic streak can be seen in all of his essays. He is mainly annoyed with the people who destroy the meaning of what they say by not being imaginative and creating their own metaphors and thus bogging down their writing into a practically unintelligible babble of polysyllabic sesquipedilian foreign inanities. (Apologies for the typos etc and the length. Am typing this from my phone and you kind of lose track of length and spelling...!)

Orwell was a great writer, but he didn't know much about language. Which wasn't really his fault, the field of linguistics was not very well known in the 40s.

For instance


To me this looks like linguistic determinism. There just isn't evidence that language shapes thought to such an extreme extent.


This is the etymological fallacy. The origin of a word or phrase is irrelevant to how it is currently used.


All language is spread by tradition and imitation. This is how language works. If it was possible that normal language use led to corruption, then why wasn't language corrupted hundreds or thousands of years ago?


I assume this is a joke: using the passive in the very sentence where he's talking about how the passive is overused. But Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage notes


Orwell's essay, where he warns us not to use the passive voice, has more passive clauses than any periodical. What that intentional?

I'm really going to have to read up on Orwell's essays - up to now I've only read his books. The discussion, above, has inspired me!

But back to the fabric topic; how about "Cotton on," meaning to understand - probably belatedly - what someone else is talking about, or doing.
E.g., "It took me a while to cotton on to the fact that you were drowning, not waving."

Ooh. I like that one.

The OED has some verb senses for cotton that look like they might have shifted to the modern sense and it does come from the same root as the fabric or plant from which the fabric is derived. AHD4 is a little more helpful in the etymology. We have but have not yet dewrapped the AHD5.

I have just seen in the dictionary, Cotton up to, meaning "to make friendly advances toward." This is a completely unknown usage so far as I am concerned.
Is anyone here familiar with it?

then there is the form "cotton to", meaning (idiomatically) to like; approve of, accept, or tolerate.

I had an uncle who frequently used it.

Is anyone here familiar with [cotton up to]?

I've heard it from speakers of American English.