I recently put the following on the "Dead Horse Chantey' thread:

>>A somewhat drifty sidenote, to show the phrase not entirely dead: when my late wife & I moved to this village 33 years ago, our London-born next-door neighbour {whom I saw recently and who is still alive in her 70s} mentioned in conversation with my wife that someone she knew had recently started a new job, for which she had received some advance payment; so that, she said "she is just working dead-horse at the moment".

Drifting even further, re another song: the same neighbour would always refer to buying second-hand clothes at a charity shop as "going to rag-fair".<<

I repeat this here, with the question: has anyone else any similar examples of phrases or usages specific to familiar folksongs surviving into current or recent usage? {Our neighbour, I should stress, was unaware of the folksong antecedents of her phrases until I told her of them. They were, to her, she said, just phrases that had been in use during her North London (Holloway Road) upbringing.}

~Michael~