'A RIGHT POPPY SHOW'
We are really having a good summer here in the UK and it's showing! Here fresh from the memory card is a shot captured about 60mins ago. I'm still puzzled by a phrase my mum and dad had to describe anything a bit tacky or second rate, they would refer to it as 'A right poppy show' strange? Any one know the answer?
posted by Supasnapper at 8:12 PM
1 Comments:
"poppy-show" is more than likely an expression originating from the English "puppet show", and it looks like it 'came back' to England through the 'Carribean language connection', altered to 'poppy show'.
In Jamaican patois "poppy show" means a ridiculous show or exhibition - one that fails or is disappointing because it is badly done or because the performer makes a clown of himself through silly behaviour or stupid talk - well, it's Punch, we don't need to say more (see here an example of Reggae lyrics, together with the explanation).
However, I found a site that says "poppy-show" means "puppet show" in...
old Cheshire dialect !
I think we might need more 'experts' :) to combine both Cheshire and Carribean references, still it seems that 'puppet show' is a plausible explanation...
All the same, I think your parents used the expression 'poppy show' (which you try to apply to your poppies now, doing them quite an injustice – I find the poppies in your pic ARE aesthetic, I like the shot!) to rate something as "gaudy", in the sense of a 'combination of colours or some other showy things'.
I may quote a fragment from D.H.Lawrence's novel Women In Love (1920) that will illustrate the latter meaning at best. We see here that a "rare poppy-show" is, in fact, a "gaudy bunch of flowers":
"Winifred [...] inform[ed] the gardener, in her high, peremptory, simple fashion, of what she wanted, telling him all the blooms she had selected.
'What do you want these for?' Wilson asked.
'I want them,' she said. She wished servants did not ask questions.
'Ay, you've said as much. But what do you want them for, for decoration, or to send away, or what?'
'I want them for a presentation bouquet.'
'A presentation bouquet! Who's coming then? - the Duchess of Portland?'
'No.'
'Oh, not her? Well you'll have a rare poppy-show if you put all the things you've mentioned into your bouquet.'
'Yes, I want a rare poppy-show.'
'You do! Then there's no more to be said.'
The next day Winifred, in a dress of silvery velvet, and holding a gaudy bunch of flowers in her hand, waited with keen impatience...""
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