Kathleen from Ithaca, New York, remembers her mother saying Go fry ice! meaning “Bug off!” It’s probably a minced oath replacing a phrase that exhorts the hearer to go do something else that starts with F. The earliest known recorded use of Go fry ice was in 1929 in a wildly popular, serialized novel by Ruth Dewey Groves called Rich Girl Poor Girl, later published as a book. Other phrases that mean the same thing: go fly a kite, go fly a kite in a telephone booth, go fry an egg, and go fry your face. A Yiddish saying along these lines translates as “Go whistle in the ocean.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Go Fry Ice”
Welcome to Way With Words.
Hello, this is Kathleen Mulligan calling from Ithaca, New York.
Hello, Kathleen. Welcome to the show.
Hi, Kathleen.
I wanted to ask you about a phrase that my mother used to use. My mother passed away in 2016. She was born in 1924, and her favorite expression was, go fry ice, which she would say to me if I said, you know, Mom, you know, won’t you let me have this pretty necklace of yours or something? And she’d say, oh, go fry ice. And I used to ask her, well, what does that mean? And she’d say, well, it means go fry ice. So I never have heard anyone else use it. And when I heard your show on the air a couple of weeks ago, I thought these are the people that can help me.
That’s such a frustrated mom explanation. It means what it means. I loved it so much that when she died, I suggested that we put it on her gravestone, but my siblings outvoted me on that.
Oh, but that would be the one that everyone would come to see, right? That would be the stone that would become legends. And if you knew my mother, it was perfect.
So you got outvoted on that epitaph?
I did. My father’s gravestone says, it’ll be fine. And that kind of says everything about my dad.
Really? I thought it would be very funny to have, it’ll be fine next to, oh, go fry ice.
Well, it’s one of those minced oaths that are similarly sort of absurd or impossible, like go fly a kite in a telephone booth or go jump in a lake. There’s an old Yiddish one that translates as go whistle in the ocean, although there’s a much naughtier version of that that you might do in an ocean.
But the earliest use I’ve found of this, it probably predates this, but in 1929 there was this wildly popular serialized novel by someone named Ruth Dewey Groves, and it was in newspapers all over the country. And it was called Rich Girl, Poor Girl. It was very dramatic. Murder and romance and racketeers and things like that. Pretty hair-raising stuff, really, for the time and place.
Yeah. And there was a character in there who said, oh, bother, tell them to go fry ice. So I’m betting that that’s it.
I bet that’s it. You think?
Well, I can imagine my mother growing up and my grandmother reading something like that. Mm— and it was probably floating around before that.
Yeah, but that’s what we’ve seen in print.
Right. And, of course, my mom was, you know, she was born in 24. She, you know, wouldn’t have been talking too much before, you know.
Well, after it was serialized in the newspapers, it was published as a book. So the novel was around for a while, and the author wrote a bunch of similar books as well. She had some, she was in vogue for a while.
Right. Oh, I bet that’s it. Okay. Have you heard other variants like go fry an egg or go fry your face?
No. I’ve never heard any other fry expressions besides go fry ice.
Gotcha. I do want to say Martha mentioned minced oaths earlier, and the minced oath that we’re talking about here is a synonym for a bug off that begins with an F that we can’t say on the radio. So it’s possible that this is a very minced oath. It’s kind of far removed from it, but it’s a very polite version. Go fry ice.
Okay. Wonderful. Okay. All right. Take care of yourself, Kathleen. Thanks for calling.
Well, thank you very much.
All right. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
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