Hard Question's??

[Armagh4SamAgain]

What does B & Q stand for? Theres a big one of there stores outside Newry and every time a pass it I wonder what it means but nobody nos.

[Square Ball]

this was on one of those Quizadry excel quizes ages ago, the answer there was... do you want me to post it?

[Square Ball]

thats the one, I pmed him

[hippity hoppity wide]

I was driving in newry looking fir the b and q and couldn't find it. I stopped and asked a yocal niuk for directions. Is there a b and q in Newry says I. Dunno says he but theres 2 Ds in Dundalk! budum tish

[screenmachine]

I stopped and asked a yocal niuk for directions. Is there a b and q in Newry says I. Dunno says he but theres 2 Ds in Dundalk! budum tish

that man had real class!! quality!

[Armagh4SamAgain]

I had a blue berry moffin today how woud you no if it was blue moldy. you coud be eating 1 thats way past its sell by day and how woud u no.

[never kickt a ball]

Nice on Armagh4samneveragain. Maybe I'll get an answer to this one at last. Why in gaelic football does the ref throw up a "hop ball?"

[Hound]

Nice on Armagh4samneveragain. Maybe I'll get an answer to this one at last. Why in gaelic football does the ref throw up a "hop ball?"

No such thing as a "hop ball" in GAA. Only in soccer.

[ONeill]

I had a blue berry moffin today how woud you no if it was blue moldy. you coud be eating 1 thats way past its sell by day and how woud u no.

Take a bit and wait til you've got to move the bowels. If it's run-of-the-mill, bob's your uncle.

run-of-the-mill - This expression alludes to fabrics coming directly from a mill without having been sorted or inspected for quality. It has survived such similar phrases as run of the mine and run of the kiln, for the products of mines and kilns. [Late 1800s]

bob's your uncle -
This is a catchphrase which seemed to arise out of nowhere and yet has had a long period of fashion and is still going strong. It's known mainly in Britain and Commonwealth countries, and is really a kind of interjection. It's used to show how simple it is to do something: "You put the plug in here, press that switch, and Bob's your uncle!".

The most attractive theory — albeit suspiciously neat — is that it derives from a prolonged act of political nepotism. The Victorian prime minister, Lord Salisbury (family name Robert Cecil, pronounced ) appointed his rather less than popular nephew Arthur Balfour to a succession of posts. The most controversial, in 1887, was chief secretary of Ireland, a post for which Balfour — despite his intellectual gifts — was considered unsuitable. The Dictionary of National Biography says: "The country saw with something like stupefaction the appointment of the young dilettante to what was at the moment perhaps the most important, certainly the most anxious office in the administration". As the story goes, the consensus among the irreverent in Britain was that to have Bob as your uncle was a guarantee of success, hence the expression. Since the very word nepotism derives from the Italian word for nephew (from the practice of Italian popes giving preferment to nephews, a euphemism for their bastard sons), the association here seems more than apt.

Actually, Balfour did rather well in the job, confounding his critics and earning the bitter nickname Bloody Balfour from the Irish, which must have quietened the accusations of undue favouritism more than a little (he also rose to be Prime Minister from 1902–5). There is another big problem: the phrase isn't recorded until 1937, in Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Mr Partridge suggested it had been in use since the 1890s, but nobody has found an example in print. This is surprising. If public indignation or cynicism against Lord Salisbury's actions had been great enough to provoke creation of the saying, why didn't it appear — to take a case — in a satirical magazine of the time such as Punch?

A rather more probable, but less exciting, theory has it that it derives from the slang phrase all is bob, meaning that everything is safe, pleasant or satisfactory. This dates back to the seventeenth century or so (it's in Captain Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785). There have been several other slang expressions containing bob, some associated with thievery or gambling, and from the eighteenth century on it was also a common generic name for somebody you didn't know. Any or all of these might have contributed to its genesis.

Source: net.

[Fiodoir Ard Mhacha]

Got a great wee book called Red herrings and white elephants which covers these common or garden phrases.

Spondulics - slang for money - comes from the Greek for peebles, which used to be a form of currency in them days.