Facebook is blamed for death of Traditional British sayings

AZ — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 08:02:18 +0000

The researchers found phrases commonly used by parents and grandparents, as “a penny for your thoughts” and “a chip on the old block” are disappearing from everyday use, with only one in 10 people regularly using.

Only one in 20 people who knew what some of the adages meant or what their origin.

Most people blamed the speed of the media as Facebook and Twitter, which encourage the updates instead of short or long speech text. Although several of the identified phrases are very short.

Among the other phrases in the survey claimed are at risk are:

A chip of the old block

Never seen a kettle boils

Cat has your tongue?

As right as rain

Like a mad hatter

Tit for tat

Bless your cotton socks

A bad worker blames his tools

Wet behind the ears

Do not look a gift horse in the mouth

Bringing home the bacon

The study found 63 per cent of parents and grandparents still regularly use the adages.

But three-quarters of respondents said that the sentences are considered threatened with extinction.

And three quarters of people only use Twitter and Facebook to keep in contact said they had not heard of more than half of the sentences.

It also emerged the average person now has three conversations with friends every day, two of which are online and one of which is a phone call.

The research was carried out by onepoll.com, a market research company of the Internet, which surveyed 4,000 people younger than 30 years.

A spokesman for the company said: “It’s a shame that these more colloquial, historical and poetic expressions are disappearing in favor of reduced, more focused and less ambiguous.

“However, not much of a surprise when you consider that television and the Internet has taken the place of family conversation in the evening.

“And now that children are increasingly using communications technology that previous generations could not have dreamed of, such as mobile phones, social networks and Twitter, so the disappearance of verbal links with the past can only be expected an increase. ”

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Facebook is blamed for death of Traditional British sayings

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