A San Diego, California, listener recalls that when asked “How’s it going?” his father would often respond “same old six and eight.” It may be a variation of the British expression “same old seven and six,” meaning “seven shillings and sixpence,” a once-common total for the cost of some types of government-issued licenses. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Six and Eight”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, Martha. This is Jonathan Wilcher. I’m from North San Diego County.
Excellent.
Hi, Jonathan.
So my question is, my father used an expression I remember since childhood.
When somebody said to him, how’s it going, he’d always respond, same old six and eight.
And when I became an adult and interested in English, that was sort of curious,
but it never occurred to me to ask him, or I never had the opportunity.
He has since passed.
But it always stuck with me, and I know there’s expressions like same old 8 to 5,
meaning the hours you work, but 6 to 8, I just never got that.
Interesting.
He’s from California, but his parents and grandparents were from Texas,
and I believe the heritage goes back to England with a last name like Wiltshire.
So either my great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather came over and ended up in Texas.
So it may have some English meaning behind it.
It does have an English connection, although you can’t ever be certain where somebody picked it up.
They’re more likely to have picked it up from a film or a book than they are from the long history from grandparent to parent to child.
The thing is the expression same old six and eight isn’t that common.
It’s actually incredibly super rare.
But it probably is just a variant of the far more common same old seven and six, which is British, which refers to shillings and six pence.
So it’s seven shillings and six pence.
And you’ll find this again and again in English literature and slang books and dictionaries and so forth.
And same old seven and six just basically means, like you said, it’s the same thing day after day.
Same old, same old, day late and a dollar short.
Here I am again doing the same old thing I did the day before and I’m probably going to do tomorrow.
And that particular number supposedly refers to the cost of certain kinds of licenses that you used to have to buy in England.
For example, a wedding license was said to have cost seven shillings and six pence.
Now, I don’t know why it should be that particular number, but there you go.
It’s interesting because when I was digging around, I could only find two references.
And one was from a book called The Inspector French’s Greatest Case.
And within that book, the expression is, the yard’s going strong, same old six and eight pence.
So I thought, well, six and eight pence, where is that from?
And then I found a reference, an annotation of Ulysses by James Joyce,
and in that annotation they give you the meaning of different expressions.
And lo and behold, I found the same old six and eight pence.
And the definition is a usual and unchanging thing, like you’re saying.
And then it says, after the usual fee for carrying back the body of an executed malfactor and giving it a Christian burial.
How my father ever came up with the same old six and eight with a father from Texas, I don’t know.
But that’s the only reference I can find.
Yeah, well, it’s possible your father learned it, like I said, from a book or a movie.
It doesn’t take many exposures to a new term before it kind of catches your fancy and you find it popping out of your mouth.
And it’s interesting to find that there’s one more thing that costs seven and six,
the cost of carrying a body.
There are a couple other uses of seven and six.
One of the slang dictionaries suggests that it’s rhyming slang,
and it means to be in a fix or to have a problem,
or that a seven and six something is to fix it.
I don’t find a lot of uses of that, though.
The citation record is really weak on that.
Probably the most common use of seven and six is in bingo calling,
which is very different than what we’re talking about here,
but I think it’s worth mentioning.
There are all these standard phrases, particularly in the United Kingdom,
that you say when you bingo call.
Like they’re drawing the ball out of the basket,
and they’re going to say the number.
But sometimes they don’t actually say the number.
They say a phrase, and then the number.
They’ll say, seven and six, was she worth it?
Or you can just abbreviate it and say, was she worth it?
That refers to, again, the cost of the marriage license.
Was it worth the marriage license to get married to the woman you’re with?
Okay.
Well, interestingly, he never said seven and six.
He always said six and eight.
So I’m just wondering if you’d ever heard of a reference to burial.
No, I haven’t.
But the six and eight, again, it sounds so much like the seven and six that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a variant on it,
like his own version of it or a version that he picked up from somewhere else.
One for a wedding and one for a burial.
Yeah.
Jonathan, if anybody else has heard about that, we’re going to hear about it.
The same old six and eight.
Yeah.
So thanks for calling.
Oh, absolutely.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
