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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2002
Posts: 1,692 |
What? You mean like honking?
Nooo - wrong generation. I seem to remember that in my young days honking meant throwing up - usually for good cause! Odorous connections there I guess.
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Joined: Jan 2001
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,156 |
For me, "going off" would need to be qualified - "going off the handle" to mean angry. "Going off" on its own, I would understand as "becoming rotten", but I wouldn't use it myself. Y'know?
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Joined: Mar 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 4,189 |
In the context of getting angry or losing one's temper the most popular idiom here is "don't go off on me!" or "don't start going off on me!'. Then we might say, "Man! He really went off on me!"
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Joined: Mar 2002
Posts: 1,692
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2002
Posts: 1,692 |
"going off the handle" to mean angry
Are you sure about that, Bean? We would say "flying off the handle" - at least *I would.
What am I doing here - must go home!
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Joined: May 2000
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addict
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addict
Joined: May 2000
Posts: 679 |
Nooo - wrong generation.
Hmmm..... legally I could be a grandfather. It's not solely a generation thing, DeeEcksBee. Honking would never have been considered 'throwing up' in my neck of the woods, so that variation is local only to England.
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Joined: Jan 2001
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,156 |
Maybe I was thinking of "going off the rails" but then I think that means something going terribly wrong. I'm a great one for mixing up stock phrases - not that I can think of any particularly salient examples at the moment but.
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Joined: Nov 2002
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member
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member
Joined: Nov 2002
Posts: 180 |
The expression "gone off" to mean spoiled or sour is Australian as well. My ex, who hails from Adelaide, used it when I hadn't known him very long, and I was brought up short thinking he meant the milk had exploded. We were in Germany at the time and sometimes I felt more confident in conversations with the locals than I did with the boy from down under.
But have you ever been told the milk has clabbered?
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Joined: Jan 2001
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,819 |
It's that chemically unstable milk that is always detonating, you know.
'Round these parts to "go off on somebody" is to yell at somebody in a vehement way, as in "Gee, I asked Joe when he was going to be ready and he just went off on me!"
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Joined: Aug 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 10,561 Likes: 1 |
Anyone remember this one?
"...setting a precedent in the annals of military history, I am the first weapon to have humanitarian reasons for going off..."
said by Professor Barnhouse, after discovering that he has a wild talent for making munitions (including nuclear ones) explode - from a distance. The Army wants to exploit his ability, but he has reservations and winds up fleeing and going incognito, then destroying all the arsenals on both sides (they had wanted him to do it more "selectively"...)
(it might be paraphrased a little; I'm pulling it back from 1956 or so)
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Report on the Barnhouse Effect
The "going off" meaning exploding would certainly be a candidate for the root of the "getting angry" meaning.
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Joined: Jul 2002
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Jul 2002
Posts: 742 |
The expression "gone off" to mean spoiled or sour is Australian as well.
The ex-cons to my west are not the only Antipodeans to use it thusly, fwiw.
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