Don’t Give Me Any of That Flannel (minicast)

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Welcome to another minicast from A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

Balderdash, piffle, flummery, twaddle, tommyrot, poppycock, claptrap.

One thing you can say about English, we have plenty of words for nonsense.

Recently, though, a listener named Richard called us to say he was caught up short by a similar word.

Here’s my question.

I love movies, and I happen to go back to listen to, to go watch the original of a movie called Get Carter with Michael Caine.

It was a British movie, wonderful flick.

But in it, he’s giving a woman some story, and she says, don’t hand me any of that flannel.

And I’ve even got subtitles on the movie, so I know that’s what she really said.

And that was the expression, flannel.

And I looked it up, and I’m trying to figure out where it came from and if you’ve ever heard of it.

-huh. So he wasn’t handing her a blanket or anything?

No, he was not. He was actually handing her a load of horse hay, but that’s okay.

And this movie is from, this is the 1971 version of it, right? Not the one that was done in 2000?

Correct. This is the 1971, and yes, it was a British movie.

Okay, and so by flannel, she meant rubbish or flummery or something like that.

Yes, horse hay, yes.

Or horse hay.

Right.

And strangely enough, when I was trying to do a little research on the expression,

I ran into two other expressions that seemed to be related.

And they both mean, you know, rubbish or hogwash.

And one was pants and the other was trousers.

Oh, really?

Actually heard recently is trowel.

Somebody reviewing the film on a also British film show said,

Oh, that movie is absolute trowel.

And so that’s a negative thing.

All three of them were negative, meaning a bunch of junk.

So pants, P-A-N-T-S?

P-A-N-T-S, correct.

Okay, so if they’re flannel pants, it’s really bad.

That’s why I thought they might be related, because flannel, then pants, and then trousers all seems to come from someone’s verbal mind.

Wow. Well, Grant, I don’t know about pants or trow. Are you familiar with that?

No, pants is, in British English, is underpants. It’s not actually your overpants.

It’s one of those points of differences between the two Englishes that causes much laughter the first time you encounter it,

And then after that it becomes kind of ordinary.

Trow, I only know in the American English expression, drop trow.

I’ve never heard it abbreviated or used in that way.

But the flannel is interesting.

It’s one of a zillion words for rubbish and nonsense in English as a whole.

Every dialect, every variant of English has a lot of ways to say poohy, you know, phooey.

You know, that’s not true or that’s can’t be believed or that’s just a lot of hogwash, you know, a lot of thick talk.

That kind of thing. It’s interesting, though. I’ve never heard flannel used on this side of the pond

That way. Have you? I mean, I’ve always thought of flannel as this positive thing, you know,

Something soft and, you know, something that you would cover yourself up with or wear on a shirt

Or a suit. I don’t think of it as being negative, but I do know that at least in British English,

You hear flannel used since, what, the 1920s or so used to mean nonsense and rubbish.

Well, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to send us flannel or silken prose or maybe a hair shirt if you think we’ve slipped up.

Send all your emails to words@waywordradio.org or stop by our discussion forum.

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Thanks for listening. For A Way with Words, I’m Martha Barnette.