Right: sometimes we just have to admit it: We don’t speak the language.
Yes, okay: it’s obviously something to do with trash, and ‘tipping’ is self-explanatory, so it’s about tipping over trash cans. But why is it called a ‘fly’ when it’s already called a dustbin? Is it a certain kind of bin? Is it because it flies over — ? Is it… Oh, never mind. In this place, skeleton keys aren’t long old fashioned keys, they’re lock picks that thieves use. Squash isn’t just a vegetable [why use that word when you could say ‘aubergine’ or ‘courgettes?’] it’s a drink. We …give up.
The droplets of rain are hanging on the twigs of that tree like tiny jewels, aren’t they? Yes, this is what we’ve come to, rhapsodizing on the freezing rain because IT SIMPLY WILL NOT QUIT.
OY, this has seemed like the longest winter on record; there have been more days of snow since the first official day of Spring than there have been all winter. Yet scientists claim that signs of Spring are appearing earlier and earlier in the American West. Well, sheesh. What a time to move five thousand miles away East and North…
– D & T
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
No – it’s because they are doing it ‘on the fly’. Being fly means being secretive
INdia
I’m good and sick of winter too. Today a friend and I saw a large truck hurtling down the road. She told me it was the knackerman on his way to pick up all the little lambs that had frozen to death. I felt like crying.
And that ‘No fly tipping’ really messed me up too, and still looks weird to me, but ‘squash’ has been a drink to me for decades; in Japan, it’s also squash. And my parents used ‘skeleton key’ to mean what it means here, so this wasn’t a new one to me either.
How about those ‘TO LET’ signs you see everywhere here? My inner middle school student is always itching to pen in the I…
I guess that it is time for me to move south and west too!
And I guessed that that rather cryptic sign meant dumping your garbage in somebody else’s dumpster or dumping it where it doesn’t belong. Maybe I watched too many prison break movies when I was a kid. The bad guy was always on the fly or on the lam. My dad liked westerns. Education comes from the strangest places.
I really thought we were well past winter, the kids have been playing outside with no coats for the past two weeks! Then today it actually snowed!! Just a very light one but c’mon it’s not nice to trick us into believing it was over 🙁
🙂 In American slang, “on the fly” means something done quickly — and not terribly thoroughly. It mainly describes motion, so it’s an amusing linguistic… confusion.
The fact that we have urban legends about ‘cow tipping’ doesn’t help this phrase. It really makes one wonder how to go about tipping a fly (as in the insect), and why it’s a bad thing!
Perhaps the real issue is that you should pick up your own trash, instead of letting the friendly fly do it for you, thus obligating you to tip the fly for his services. I’d never recommend more than 20%, personally.