Today has reminded me that there is a generation gap between me and my younger employees. Today in production meeting, I said “that someone was trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” and they did not know what I was talking about. For you a lot younger than me, it means to be unable to turn something ugly or inferior into something attractive or of value, such; no matter how expensive his clothes, he still looks sloppy – you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. This expression was already a proverb in the mid-1500s. Not wait a minute, I am not that old!
Another one today was “salting money down”. Salting money down is an idiom that means to save something, especially money, for use at a later time. Salting away money for retirement is a good example.
When I was a child my mother would have an expression that I would not understand. I would ask her where does that come from and she would say it was an “old ettered saying”. When I became an adult and my mother had passed away I googled ettered sayings and it was her Irish or East Tennessee way of saying uttered saying. These are sayings that have been passed down from generation to generation. I am just doing my part and passing them to the younger generation.
