Who said softly softly catchee monkey

She is asked to choose a regent to rule in her place in the event that she dies and the baby survives. Albert is heartened and takes an interest in building a new railroad, which Victoria discourages as she worries that he could undermine her rule. Some accounts trace the phrase back to the founder of the Boy Scouts, Lord Robert Baden-Powell, who picked it up while he was in Ghana. Victoria - Unconvincing CGI scenes upset viewers. It doesn't sell product and it's not politically correct.

It would be interesting to k. Your this post first firs page rank when you search the term softly, softly catchee monkey. Even before the phrase finder site that lists the meanings. How did you get this brainwave? Thanks for this! I was reading a football commentator on the BBC website and he used this phrase. My wife is from Manchester and had never heard it herself, so apparently it's not universally known.

I first heard it in the series The Office, Gareth uses it : "You know the phrase 'Softly softly catchee monkey? I could catch a monkey". I'm a American copyeditor for a newsletter that targets a mostly UK audience and just had this come across the transom as the title to a story - had to ask a UK colleague what on earth it meant. Funny, because I speak German and the German idiom is one I recognized right away. Thanks for clearing it up! One of those habits you get in as you get older is being able to skip words because you understand the general idea of the content.

An American dictionary probably wouldn't have Softly Softly in it anyway. I like to discuss language and really look at some of the phrases beyond a simple definition - a blog is a perfect place to do it. I'm a 44 year old American and I've known about the "softly softly catchee monkey" phrase for as long as I can remember. I don't know where I picked it up from, or when, but I've never considered it to be a particularly British phrase, nor did I find it difficult to understand.

The phrase is pretty darn self-explanatory. I would have thought any moderately well-educated American who reads broadly should have picked up the phrase at some point in their lives. Well, well, one does read about things previously unheard of here, doesn't one? I'm a Brit - but I learnt this phrase from my Kung-Fu master. Only just coming to understand it. On the other hand that Three Monkeys proverb - what's that all about?! I know it is a long time later, but I know the phrase from Miss Marples, can't remember which film though.

A Quite a bit, as it happens. The expression is indeed frequently attributed to Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, largely because he uses it three times in his diary about his activities in what is now Ghana in Prempeh was then King of Ashanti. It appears in a book of , Scottish Proverbs, Collected and Arranged by Andrew Henderson, in the form safly, safly, catch monkey. Even earlier, the idiom is in the rambling autobiography of a well-known English actress, Mary Wells later Mrs Mary Sumbel , active in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth.

She records that she went one day, it would seem from context in London, to hear an itinerant black preacher:. Though there was no long-sounding chapter or high-numbered verse from which it was taken, I was convinced notwithstanding, by the arguments of the sooty Ethiopian, that patience and perseverance will overcome many obstacles.

Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Sumbel , Vol. The Morning Post , 23 Apr. At the time, Exeter Hall in the Strand was the headquarters of the anti-slavery movement in London, so sable object is an oblique reference to black Africans.