Words/phrases you have seen in books that you have never heard a real life person say

@TellingBone oh yes! Golden Age crime fiction is a treasure-trove of now-mostly-forgotten phrases (I think that’s partly why I love it). Another Miss Silver devotee here.

My favourite author, Patricia Wentworth, wrote mainly during the Golden Age of crime fiction. Lots of words and phrases her characters use have now fallen out of use.

Two that immediately spring to mind:

'That's piling Pelion on Ossa' - I had to look this up. It means to make a difficult situation even worse.

'A silly, peter-grievous female...' - a melancholy person apparently.

Thanks so much!

Thanks for that explanation, I got as far as the D, but couldn't get the OM.

@Weedingtodo It took us ages to work out - one of our last ones to complete!

'Heading to Greenland' = G ('heading' often indicates the first letter in crossword land)

'I'm afraid' = eek!

'daughters' = d (using a single letter abbreviation for words is also standard, and Chambers dictionary is the approved place to check which ones are OK, although tbh we don’t go that far and don’t use it). To be super-pedantic, because it’s in the plural I'd have expected ‘daughters' to imply a double d…so this is a slightly clunky clue actually.

'OM' = Order of Merit, an order

And finally, 'Anoraks' = the definition of the whole clue (you can expect this to come either at the beginning or end of the clue)

Answer - Geekdom.

Phew! 😅

@Terpsichore
I’m useless at crosswords, but somehow fascinated by them! I can’t figure out how you get that answer from that clue. I do get the geek/anorak bit but the rest of it is a mystery to me. Could you explain further please? 🙏

We used anorak a lot growing up, but it’s true you don’t hear it anymore. An anorak, though was a type of coat, a raincoat. Also, used as a mild, derogatory slang word, meaning ‘square’ - is that used anymore?

DH and I were doing a crossword the other day and the clue was Heading to Greenland, I’m afraid daughters order anoraks

Answer: Geekdom

That would annoy me as well, and I feel it should be ‘The next day’, , or even, ‘On the next day, we did…’.

I have been reading a novel with DC which repeatedly has started a sentence with ‘Next day, …’. It sounds so wrong to me, like it should be ‘The next day, …’ does anyone know what I mean?!!

We used anorak a lot growing up, but it’s true you don’t hear it anymore. An anorak, though was a type of coat, a raincoat. Also, used as a mild, derogatory slang word, meaning ‘square’ - is that used anymore?

Thinking of the padding, I've never heard of anyone remarking on a big, usually overweight man "moving with surprising swiftness and grace", though it crops up a lot in badly-written and/or lazily-edited books.

I think it was Kyril Bonfiglioli who sarcastically wove this annoying trope into one of his Mortdecai novels. All of which are very funny.

Tilting or lifting your chin in defiance or pride. Always women.

Started reading a book by an author new to me yesterday evening. The main character had
a way of tilting her chin in an unconscious gesture of defiance.

So did I, never heard of it. I was Eastend of Glasgow though, so maybe said elsewhere!

Oh yes, you often get a muscle twitching in blokes' jaws when they're getting annoyed. Never seen it myself.

He's clenching his masseter muscles to suppress a grimace. We all do it, but it tends to be more visible in men. Some actors are really good at showing concealed anger this way.

I understood that until the 50s frills might be whipped, collars could be starched, frocks might be basted, darts might be put in things,

One of the things I like about the Little House books is the descriptions of how Ma went about making their clothes.

Jack and Philip and Dinah and Lucy-Ann always wore shorts and jerseys, didn't they.

(Except I've just seen the cover of a modern edition with stupid cartoon like figures with the girls wearing skirts. And all four of them appear to have red hair.)

Yes this is very Gen Z. My teens say it and an intern at work said it yesterday 😂

I’m reading a series where the male characters are always “tightening their jaws”

I can’t even picture what this means

The uniform list for my local school still uses the word slacks…’two pairs of grey slacks’ 😁

I finished the last book and began another today. Someone's lifting her chin ...

'Demurred' crops up a lot more in books than it does in real life. If you hear it on an audiobook, there's a high chance that it will be pronounced as 'demured', demonstrating that it's a print word rather than a spoken word. I shake my fist at the lack of editing in those cases...

Nonchalant is trendy amongst teens at the moment thanks to TikTok. Never heard it used by kids in 25 years teaching and now it's everywhere!

Absolutely loved reading this, thank you!! So much nostalgia came back to me just reading the list Nanny goes through 😍

PS I think these are the rompers….

Great observations about materials, @Shithotlawyer. I too was steeped in Victorian fiction and also all the Streatfeild oeuvre and loved the descriptions of clothes. In case anyone's interested, there’s a very enjoyable blog called Clothes in Books and it also touches on tarlatan - https://clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/2012/02/what-you-need-at-stage-school-ballet.html

I can while away many happy hours just reading the various posts on that blog….