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Re: Bicycle tyre brands


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Posted by Adam Quinan on September 03, 2016 at 03:14:22 user Adam.

In Reply to: Re: Bicycle tyre brands posted by Mike Dennis on September 02, 2016 at 22:00:20:

I think we should be careful of proceeding from a particular Ransome usage to assume that it was a more general but now passed usage.
My family sometimes use odd words or catchphrases for things or actions, not because that is what we learned in school or from other families but because someone, sometime in the past, used that word and it caught the fancy of the hearers and they continued to use it perhaps to recall the amusement or perhaps to baffle outsiders.

Now, of course, having made the claim I am trying to recall one of those family words...

One of us in the bath playing with a small boat referred to it as a "sinking drailer". After that anything that wasn't going well or looked like foundering was either called or likened to a sinking drailer. If I had written that in a book and been allowed by my editor to let it pass, no doubt my legions of fans would be discussing exactly what a drailer was, how did it sink and why wasn't the word in the OED?

Perhaps Arthur or one of his siblings asked for something to be "hotted up" on occasion and it became a piece of the Ransome family language which he shared with us.


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