I could swear, if not quite on a stack of Bibles then certainly on my own personally-annotated, heavily-yellowed, silverfish-filigreed and stinking-of-mothballs copy of The Making of the English Working Class, that the phrase 'health and safety problem', as per its contemporary usage, had no currency in the blue-collar workplace in Brisbane in 1939.
Sayin'.
Mine's lost half its' front cover. & I gather some sweet innocent writer needs time down mine with pick & miner's lamp. And cheese & pickle sandwiches for crib. Oh dear.
ReplyDeleteAt least they didn't call it an "issue".
ReplyDeleteSayin'.
I'm reading one of Walter Scott's 'Tales of the Crusaders'. One of the characters is slaughtered in battle by Welshmen; another might be being poisoned. Now that's a health and safety problem for you!
ReplyDeleteI had a double take when I came across this sentence a while back: "Yet here she now had to hang about, alone, unhappy, the target of all eyes." It's from THE GETTING OF WISDOM (1910). And I thought "hang about" was modern usage.
ReplyDeletePerry Middlemiss