no edYou never ever met my Dad then Pete.
A Birmingham boy, been going since the 70s, described in one report as a legend and on Thursday night at the Robin, Wolverhampton.
Bob
I've always thought it was just a Brummie expression.I'm wondering if people from Shropshire use that phrase - I worked (in London) with a girl who came from that county but she had never heard of the saying 'round the Wrekin' !
So did II've always thought it was just a Brummie expression.
"Any road" was used in my family, but "no way" I think is pretty national and came into use in the Seventies.Way and road are the same and I have heard both anyway and any road. However I have heard 'Any road up' on Corry and assumed that it was a Northern expression.
You can also get 'No way' and 'No road' which I did hear many years ago in the Black Country
This on another forum is interesting
Anyroad and Anyway
As far as I know, anyway is a common word used by both American and British English speakers to mean in any case, nevertheless, etc. I never thought much about the word until I noticed that Britishenglish.stackexchange.com
Most online dictionaries do not list snob as meaning shoemaker but do say the word is of unknown origin. However I have come across this on a website called etymonline.com:
snob (n.)
1781, "a shoemaker, a shoemaker's apprentice," of unknown origin. It came to be used in Cambridge University slang c. 1796, often contemptuously, for "townsman, local merchant," and passed then into literary use, where by 1831 it was being used for "person of the ordinary or lower classes." Meaning "person who vulgarly apes his social superiors" is by 1843, popularized 1848 by William Thackeray's "Book of Snobs." The meaning later broadened to include those who insist on their gentility, in addition to those who merely aspire to it, and by 1911 the word had its main modern sense of "one who despises those considered inferior in rank, attainment, or taste.
gi as your donnyI remember the saying "A job in the town" being used to describe something good or special. It probably came from the fact that if you worked in the city centre (always called "Town" in Brum) you were a bit "white collar" rather than getting dirty in a factory.
A job in the town
My mother in law, who came from Middlesbrough, used to say "San Fairy Ann", so definitely not an expression unique to Birmingham - "donny", which I and my family still use, is a Brummie-only expression.At the risk of straying off topic I think a lot of pseudo french phrases were brought back with soldiers returning from the Great war. Plonk is one example (Vin Blanc), San Fairy Ann (Ca ne fait rien) is another. Those two phrases are known throughout the country so why particular ones such as Donny and Arley Barley are peculiar to Birmingham I have no idea.
Welcome to the Forum dinah..............wonderful people and lots of very good information with a history lesson thrown inI still get funny looks when I say I've been all round the Wrekin as I've lived in Lancashire for the last 30 odd years. This thread has brought back to me all the Brummy sayings I grew up with and yes, we did call hands donnies, have arley barleys and 'san fairy ann' and 'any road up' were common expressions in our family.