Posted by Robert Hill on March 30, 2002 at 21:24:27 from 195.92.168.168:
In Reply to: Re: Naughty words posted by Bob Hollis on March 29, 2002 at 05:54:32:
In English industrial towns it was once possible to be employed as a
knocker-up. It meant that you walked the streets with a long pole and
knocked on the bedroom windows of factory workers to help ensure they got
to work on time.
Quite often, with these words and phrases that appear to be rude in one
English-speaking country and not in another, the situation is actually
more complex. Thus the coarse sense of "knock up" is used in some
quarters in Britain, but is not sufficiently dominant to have prevented
your friend from using the phrase in another sense; contrariwise, "sod"
for "turf" is also used in Britain, but more in poetry than in garden
centres.