At my local bridge club, one member has his own coffee mug that has printed on the side “Not my circus, Not my monkeys”. I had never heard this before so I asked him what it meant and he said that it meant that whatever was the issue under discussion, it did not concern him and he wanted to have no part in it. I thought that it was one of those local idioms that people have. In Sri Lanka was have all manner of local idioms in the English language. “Don’t try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs” and “Why don’t you grow brinjals in your back garden?” are two particularly weird ones. The former means that you are trying to teach someone something that they already know very well while the second is essentially telling someone that they are wasting your time and should go and do something else. How these came about would be fascinating (Why would grandmothers know how to suck eggs? Why would they suck eggs anyway?) but their origins are lost in the mists of time
But then two days ago I was watching the British police procedural “Dept Q” that takes place in Scotland and in one scene, the police detective starts to explain something to his superior and she cuts him off, saying “Not my circus, Not my monkeys”. I burst out laughing at hearing this and realized that it must be more than a local saying so looked it up.
It originates apparently in Polish as the literal translation of the expression “Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy”. How such a phrase could have originated is not hard to guess. A circus is a chaotic situation and monkeys are hard to control and one can well imagine that it represents wanting to wash one’s hands of a messy situation.
I don’t know that I would even use such a saying myself. It sounds a little callous and unfeeling towards whoever is trying to explain something complicated to you.
But it is amusing.
Idioms like that are always fascinating as to their origins, as they often make sense, or conversely make no sense at all, at least on the surface.
One that got me was when I was visiting a cousin in South Carolina, and he took me to visit an elderly friend of his, who had interesting stories to tell. At one point she was laughing at some shenanigans she was relating from her youth and described her friend as being “happy as a dead pig in the sunshine,” oblivious to whatever was going on around her. I’d never heard that before, but have run across it a couple of times since.
I assume its grisly reference is that a dead pig bloats, especially under the hot sun, and causes a death rictus that makes it look like it’s grinning. There’s also an extra layer of irony in it, as a live pig would not be happy lying in direct sunshine, as they can both overheat and sunburn. So a pig would only be happily oblivious to being in the sun if it were dead.
“Don’t try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs” is a common saying in Britain; possibly the US as well. It’s even referenced in the novel The Hobbit.
As for why, Wikipedia has this to say: “The origins of the phrase are not clear. The Oxford English Dictionary and others suggest that it comes from a translation in 1707, by J. Stevens, of Francisco de Quevedo (Spanish author): “You would have me teach my Grandame to suck Eggs”. A record from 1859 implies common usage by that time. Most likely the meaning of the idiom derives from the fact that before the advent of modern dentistry (and modern dental prostheses) many elderly people (grandparents) had very bad teeth, or no teeth, so that the simplest way for them to consume protein was to poke a pinhole in the shell of a raw egg and suck out the contents; therefore, a grandmother was usually already a practiced expert on sucking eggs and did not need anyone to show her how to do it.”
It’s sourced to the book “Hair of the Dog to Paint the Town Red: the Curious Origin of Everyday Sayings and Fun Phrases” by Andrew Thompson, but I don’t have the book and can’t check.
Per Idiom Origins:
This site also explained to me (finally!) what it means (meant) to “go pound sand.”
In the Spanish novel Fortunata y Jacinta, published in 1888 by Benito Pérez Galdós, the young male heir Juanito meets the peasant named Fortunata (“born lucky”) in their hometown of Madrid. One of the times they meet, she’s sucking on an egg--something very-poor people often did since raw egg needed no cooking nor utensils to eat. In my college class, we were all squicked out, but the professor (also from Madrid) assured us that this was a common thing in Spain at that time.
Hearkening back to your post about difficult novels, the readers of that novel when it was published understood that metaphor that watching someone suck on a raw egg was a metaphor for a carnal relationship, and were therefore not surprised (as my college class was) when Fortunata turned up pregnant a couple of pages later.
As for “not my circus, not my monkeys”, it’s not callous at all. A wise person won’t get involved with the amped up drama and histrionics that don’t concern them. Fox news and conservatives are experts at creating dramas and getting their followers all worked up about it because a hysterical mind is easy to manipulate. For example, in the run-up to Bush’s revenge war in Iraq, I heard more than one person parrot, “We have to go after Hussein--HE KILLED HIS OWN PEOPLE!” Conservatives used that as an excuse to send thousands of American soldiers (and the soldier of USA’s allies) to their deaths.
Frank Herbert also used the expression in Children of Dune:
I don’t know how common it is in the US, but my old southern grandmother used to say, “Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs” fairly regularly. I just put it down as one of those inexplicable southernisms. Like, “Naked as a jay bird” or, “Look like you’re afraid the dead lice will fall off ya.”
The problem with that attitude is, it may not be your circus, and they may not be your monkeys; but it’s your stuff they are smashing up, and your carpets they are shitting all over.
In Dept Q though the speaker was correct. The show is full of unpleasant people being nasty to each other (and violent and gory and torture porn)
The UK magazine The New Statesman used to run a regular competition for readers (I don’t know if it does now -- it may have dropped it along with the socialism it used to espouse), which generally involved composing a witty short poem or piece of prose on some topic. One issue asked for a verse version/explanation of a popular saying, and one of the winning entries was:
I made a mistake in my #9. I’ve now found the book of New Statesman competitions I read that verse in (it’s called Salome Dear, Not in the Fridge!), and it wasn’t a winning entry, but was given as an example, drawn from the Penguin More Comic and Curious Verse. The best of the actual winning entries was this:
I made up my own -- long after the competition, and on reading the book:
The book’s title is a “gruesome”, of which the exemplar given is: