'In the trenches'

I usually hear that people have 'the lurgy'

This. ^ It's like when your mum was mad at you when you were naughty and she said 'I'll bloody kill you in a minute!' She wasn't actually going to kill her child!

Or when someone says they 'laughed their head off! Their head didn't drop off!

Or when someone finds something hilarious, and says 'OMG I'm dead!' They're not dead!

Or when someone says 'For the millionth time will you stop that (or something similar,)' they have not said it 999,999 times before.

So someone saying they're in the trenches when they're finding life hard going, is fine!

I haven't heard anyone say this for some time, but yeah you're right, this has been a saying for some years when someone has a cold/flu. 'Urgh, I feel so ill, I've got the plague!'

YABU. My DS2 only slept for 20 minutes and then screamed the street down for 6 hours straight, before another 20 minutes sleep and another 6 hours...on a loop for 2 years. There were days I wished someone would just kill me. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to go through and even now I'm so fiercely protective of my sleep that it affects my social life, for example.

I’m pretty sure that 99.99% of people who use the phrase are actually fully aware that raising your baby in their nice warm home is not in any way comparable to living in mud, being shelled, going over into no man’s land and seeing their friends blown to bits. It’s just a phrase.

doing my head in - one’s head is not actually being done in.
its getting on my tits - nothing that gets on my tits has ever been literally ‘on my tits’. Except my husband….

and so on and so forth.

YABU
We call a night before we go to work ‘A school night’.
If someone’s got a leg that’s broken in three places we say ‘I’ve got this stupid leg’
If someone’s in a challenging season we say they’re ’in the trenches’.
It’s entirely benign and not intended to offend.
Get over yourself.

YABU - it’s an idiom.

WW1 soldiers were talking about the plague back then, from the bottom of their trenches. Shame.

It's just an expression that's evolved over the decades to mean something that is tough to go through, and wears you down. Chill your boots @saraclara

Ffs. It’s hyperbole. Nobody thinks it’s as bad as literally being in active combat. Get a grip.

You will sound like a right muppet if you say that. Darren knows. Darren is not expecting you to believe he's in an actual war zone, or believe he's in live WW1 tranches.

Voted for ring. YABU

Nowadays it’s just a metaphor for a long and challenging task. It’s daft to take offence. Would you be offended by other metaphors with similar origins - in the line of fire, on the front line, having a skirmish…?

They’re all in common parlance. No-one cares.

I just got in touch (via Ouija board) with an ancestor from the 1300s who is very upset about our use of language about the plague in 2025. They have been very triggered.

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People say they’ve got the plague when they have a bad cold. One third of Europe died of the plague in the 1300s. I don’t find it offensive. As others have said, language evolves

I find the phrase irritating but voted YABU because ultimately it is just a bit of hyperbole, like many turns of phrase are.

I think you missed the bit where I clearly said I don’t find it offensive. Just fucking boring and overused.

Absolutely yanbu in your view and the truth is, of course you are correct.

However, I do think that when you have several children, 3 under 4 or 5years, getting zero sleep, children are ill and you don't have family help, you can absolutely feel like you are drowning.

You can feel that nothing in your life has prepared you for this.

I think the expression comes from a feeling that you are completely stuck where you are and that you just have to somehow survive it.

But if you have read the experiences of very often the youngest of soldiers during both wars in any detail, you would definitely not believe the two are comparable.

My grandmother told me her cousin and his best friend signed up for WW1 as 18 year olds.
Her cousin returned some years later having miraculously survived, but struggled with his health for the rest of his life.

People have started using it where I work. I do want to say - you work from home in IT Darren give it a rest. Some people have said that language evolves which I agree and is right - but in this case it's hyperbole that's evolving.

I think in the trenches just means that relentlessness with little to no respite in the early years. Also different babies and people are different some people find it harder than others some have easier babies or young children, so many variables.

In my case in the first 7 years of parenthood, I was fine with the kids but really felt that my marriage was over and more or less assumed it would terminally break down at any moment or that we'd inevitably separate once the kids were older. However by some fluke we got one kid free weekend and went away together and it was literally the first time we'd spend whole days away from the kids since they'd been born and it was only there I realised that we did still love really each other but that most of the time we were both so under duress and over stimulated by family life that we just couldn't connect to ourselves or each other possibly because we are both quite introverted people.

We held on to that for a long time even though time alone was infrequent and now the kids are older it is much better but when they were little it was very much like being in survival mode working, domestic chores, looking after them and not much else. For me anyway there is some truth in the saying that kids bring you joy but also destroy all the other sources of joy in your life.

It’s a metaphor love. Why do people choose to get so offended about stupid shit?

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I am a veteran and I don't much like it. So, I don't use it. I don't police other people's language though. How people choose to speaks tells you a lot about who they are.

There are other phrases that MN get het up about that I see as normal phrases. Yet because of their historical origin (longer ago than WW1), there are plenty on MN who see them as offensive.

Some people feel that way about "get in the bin". Didn't a soldier die in a bin a few years ago?

Orrrrrrrr let's not get too specific about idiomatic language. It will all offend someone, but without it our language would be entirely colourless.