Qu'est ce que jolly c'est

In honor of my father, who died in 2006, I wanted to list a few of his favorite phrases here. Actually I should have done this on his birthday, which was July 24, when he would have been 84 this year, but due to laziness and pressure of work... no actually, just laziness, I didn't. So here they are now. (I have listed a few of these in previous posts):

- Qu'est ce que jolly c'est?

It's funny, this is the worst phrase, and Lord only knows where he got it from, but every time something a tiny bit unexpected happens, I say this, and of course no-one can understand it.

- This is a one-eyed joint

Likewise, who knows where he got it from, and if you look in Google, apart from this blog, it appears once, and I'm not quite sure why. He did, however, say it all the time to describe places which did not come to the expected standards.

- I say, you chaps

Well, pure Billy Bunter, and my father was in boarding school from 1933 until I'm guessing, 1944. No mystery there. My father always addressed the family en masse in this manner. Actually, he usually prefixed most sentences with the words "I say".

- What?

My father usually finished up a sentence with the word "what". He wasn't asking a question. The "what" was used as the "n'est ce pas" in French. For example, "Well, it's nice weather, isn't it, what?"

"Damn all"

"I've got damn all time", "There's damn all to see on the telly".

Oh, I will think of more.