Why Pick On The Grandmothers?

Idiom. We all love a bit of idiom. If I’d been a better writer, I’d have used an example there that would have been both fitting and hilarious but I didn't so let’s just pretend that I did and agree that it was fabulous and we can all move on. Cheers.

Something struck me the other day when I heard a couple of phrases used one after the other in relatively quick succession. There seems to be a number of phrases that inexplicably single out grandmothers when there is no real logical reason to do so. “What, oh Baldy One, are you drivelling on about now?” Well, dear hypothetical literary device of a question asker, let me elucidate with some examples that I’ve come across recently.

“I’d sell your grandmother for the chance to ”
Who’s buying grandmothers and what are they using them for? What is the going exchange rate on a grandmother? Can they be exchanged in retail outlets for goods and services? This conjures to mind the image of grandmother farms - rows upon rows of grandmothers stacked up ready for redeployment to needy grandchildren. Kind of like battery chicken but with more knitting and a stronger smell of Werthers Originals.

“I’ll teach your grandmother to suck eggs.”
Sucking an egg seems like one of the slowest ways possible to eat it. Unless you’re eating them raw, in which case that seems revolting in addition to carrying the increased risk of salmonella. Why would you want to expose your grandmother to that? Additionally, if the reason that you’re teaching her to suck eggs is because she doesn’t have any working teeth, it seems to me that the kinder and less cheapskate option would be to get her some teeth so she can chew her eggs with a bit of dignity.

“And if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bicycle.”
No, she wouldn’t. She’d be an elderly woman with two wheels awkwardly grafted onto her. Even if this did somehow work as a means of transportation, you would then have to clamber up on to her somehow and devise some sort of means of propelling her forwards her in order to approximate any sort of cycling capability which just seems to add to the cruelty. I think that the more accurate version would be “if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be sad, confused and possibly in some degree of pain”.

In conclusion then, leave the elderly out of the idioms. They’ve got their own stuff to be getting on with. Besides, it’s probably nearly time for Dickinson’s Real Deal.