So this morning, during a momentary lull in my workday, I was perusing my huge and unorganized list of bookmarks when I ran across a bookmark to the Burma Shave section of The Fifties Web.
For those of you, like myself actually, who are to young to have witnessed them yourself, Burma Shave used to put advertising slogans on signs up and down the roads in the US. For more on this, you can check out the article at Wikipedia.
Here’s you a good one:
The wife Who keeps on Being kissed Always heads Her shopping list
Burma-Shave
It’s always nice to see that the Internet is being used to keep alive parts of our culture that might otherwise go by the wayside of progress.
Another day, another off the wall saying.
So my father used to use the phrase “You Can’t Roller Skate In A Buffalo Herd” all the time when I was growing up. Until recently I never really cared what the origin was, I used the phrase and went on.
Recently, however, the subject of my unusual phrases came up at a luncheon for one of my student assistants that had just gotten a new job as a full time staff member in another department.
So, here’s the origin. The phrase comes from a song by Roger Miller entitled, strangely enough, You Can’t Roller Skate In A Buffalo Herd. For the complete lyris visit .
Every now and then I will utter a saying that I grew hearing or using that makes my assistants wonder.
Today I happened to use the saying If wishes were horses, beggars would ride in reference to one of my assistants wish that the timesheet process here was all done electronically instead of the paper system that we have.
She wondered where I get these things from. I thought it was a pretty common saying, but I had never actually investigated where it originated, so I went googling.
The first reference I found was from Bartleby.com which listed the meaning behind the saying according to the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy as:
If wishing could make things happen, then even the most destitute people would have everything they wanted.
While this was nice, I already knew what it meant, so I went googling some more for the origin of the phrase. It turns out that it is a line from a Mother Goose nursery rhyme, entitled If Wishes Were Horses:
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If turnips were watches, I would wear one by my side. And if “ifs” and “ands” Were pots and pans,
There’d be no work for tinkers!
Ref: apples4theteacher.com