Words and phrases we remember

Just thought of a unique Coventry phrase that I used on this forum the other day!!... 'Come on The Old Five!'

I was speaking to a lovely lady today about the city's history, and she said that years ago, anyone that was born within the city walls, was said to have had a button in their cap. Has anyone else heard that saying?

Isn't "True as Coventry Blue" a unique Coventry phrase. I believe it was to do with colour in old time weaving. Stand to be corrected on that one though.

True as Coventry blue relates to the colour fast Coventry Blue, The making of this blue was a guild secret passed from master to apprentice in the dyers guild. This was such a well kept secret that today nobody knows how Coventry blue was made, or even what shade it was.

An interesting article has just appeared in the Coventry Telegraph relating to the top 40 "unique" Coventry words & phrases - link

I've just been browsing the list of top 40 "unique" Coventry words & phrases in the Coventry Telegraph list. I'm not sure how accurate it is because I grew up speaking over half the words on it and I was in my twenties before I came down here. I suspect that many of what we think of as local words got spread by soldiers during the war and people who moved around for work so became much more widespread and their origin is very difficult to track down. Obviously words like Beduth will be truly local as well as words where the local accent plays an important part in the pronunciation.

I had forgotten 'jetty' as an alternative to the usual 'entry' in Coventry but I remember it now. Strange in as landlocked a place as Coventry is!

I have just been reading the Penguin "Famous Trials" book which deals with the 1939 IRA bomb attack in Coventry. I came across this during the article:- "He returned at ten-past one and left the cycle in the 'jetty' (as Coventry oddly calls its back lanes) behind the house."

I asked my mother, a lifelong Coventrian, about the terms entry and jetty and, to her mind, the terms are interchangeable and don't distinguish between different types of passageway. I remember my dad saying jetty slightly more often than entry.

As children we always used the term "entry" but my mother, born in Foleshill tended to use the word "jitty". She did not use the word jetty which is defined broadly as a structure jutting out into water. Jitty is defined in "Wiktionary" as "the narrow passage between rows of terraced houses or a fenced or hedged pathway linking two areas of a village". Jitty not jetty.

Another old topic that caught my eye. Two that spring to mind for me are... When asking my dad where he was going, his reply was always "Nutting down the Rudge". Dad was born in Coventry and never lived anywhere else, so I presume the "Rudge" is somewhere local? The phrase I always remember my mum saying was when the sky was full of dark rain clouds, she would say "It's black over Bill's mother's". Always wondered whom Bill was. I am sure there shall be more that I shall remember now that my mind is in gear!

For the first one, I thought you were going to say "There and back, to see how far it is".

Another one of my dad's was "Going to see a man about a dog".

One of my Dad's favourites when we were kids was 'belt up in the back!' Only some of the time was he talking about the seat belts. Why it meant 'shut up' I'm not sure.