BS: 'Going for Messages'

Subject: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Rog Peek
Date: 19 Sep 09 - 07:26 PM

There is a phrase that some people in Ireland, particularly the older generation use to describe going to the shop for groceries, they say they are 'going for messages'. One of our neighbours in Ireland, a ninety two year old retired farmer was talking, when we were there last, of times when people were very poor, he said "They didn't even have enough to go for messages."
        
Does anyone know the origin of this phrase being used in this context?

Rog

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Jack Campin
Date: 19 Sep 09 - 08:15 PM

It's also standard in Scotland (not just among the old).

I thought it was a very old usage, but the OED doesn't mention it and the Aberdeen UP Concise Scots Dictionary says it's 20th century.

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Alice
Date: 19 Sep 09 - 08:18 PM

Could it be that the store is where the phone was, where messages were taken down?

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: open mike
Date: 19 Sep 09 - 08:30 PM

or the shopping list was a sort of message?

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Amos
Date: 19 Sep 09 - 09:34 PM

Well, if I were conspiring, for example, against a foreign colonial invader, say, and I had a culture with no phones, I can't think of a better place to use as a network node for communications than the local general store.

How else would you pass the word for the pikes to be ready? Paul Revere?


A

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Alice
Date: 19 Sep 09 - 09:45 PM

Ah, I think I found it. Post office/general store. Messages from the post office (or gossip additionally) and shopping at the same time.

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Alice
Date: 19 Sep 09 - 09:50 PM

And then there is this from dervala.net

The Messages
Monday, August 29th, 2005

Nora rode a Raleigh bike. It was black and basic—three gears, hand brakes, a pump for the inevitable punctures. A gray leatherette bag hung from the handlebars. Every day or every other day she'd ride into town for "messages."She would return with some muttonchops and rashers, the day's provisions, staples and necessities, ten Woodbines for Tommy, Maguire & Patterson matches, and a newspaper. The spuds and onions and cabbage all came from the haggard out the back door beyond the whitethorn trees. The eggs came fresh from her own hens. Bread she made—plump loaves of soda bread, crossed like a good Catholic, baked in her covered cast-iron pot with turf coals on the bottom and on top. Milk was their business. Every now and then she'd kill a goose.

But it was that trope, "going for messages,"—not marketing, not shopping—that best described the difference between the "custom" in West Clare and "consumers" in Michigan.

…

By then in America we went to "super" markets for the stuff that filled the back of cars with a month's provisions and spent the time at the checkout watching the charges as the clerk rang them up, or rummaging for the coupons, or sighing in commiseration with our fellow shoppers and sellers fro whom the transactions had become just work, just getting it—the money and the stuff. In trade for "messages" we got discounts, "paper or plastic?" and "have a nice day," all in the one monotony of corporate good manners. The market is common, global, and dull. We buy in bulk, bank by machine, and couldn't care less about the name on the sign. More and more, we point and click our way past any human interaction.
…

Nora came home the long road from Kilkee with a small bag of things—a day's worth of perishables, a night's worth of news—her messages. We return bulging with our bags and boxes of stuff—our newer faster brighter bigger better-than-ever-right-priced stuff—laden and empty, grim and wordless.

—Thomas Lynch, Booking Passage

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Alice
Date: 19 Sep 09 - 10:02 PM

messages = errands

Going to shops and places, going for messages, going on errands.

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Alice
Date: 19 Sep 09 - 10:03 PM

So it's not the phone or the post office, it is just that messages means the same thing as errands.

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Doug Chadwick
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 03:59 AM

When I grew up, in Liverpool, my Mum would do her daily "shopping" in the shops that lined either side of the main road. If she ran out of something unexpectedly and needed it there and then, rather than wait for the next time she went shopping, I would be sent to the corner shop "to go for a message".

As said above, "message"= "errand". The difference between that and "shopping" was a matter of scale.

DC

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Dave Sutherland
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 04:34 AM

A common phrase in the North East too; in fact I had an aunt who, well into the fifties, talked about going for "the rations".

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Wyrd Sister
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 05:21 AM

As a child, I thought 'rations' was a word for groceries. Of course, rationing didn't end until 1954. I remember being corrected by my mum when we didn't have to get 'rations' any more.

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Jack Campin
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 08:17 AM

"Messages" in Scotland doesn't just mean "errand", it means the physical stuff you buy and carry home in bags.

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Rog Peek
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 08:32 AM

Yes Jack, that's how I understand it.

I'm not really looking for the meaning as much as the origin.

Thanks for everyone's contributions.

Rog

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: JennieG
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 08:44 AM

My grandparents used this expression in Oz, in a country town in the late 50s-early 60s. It was also used as a question - "do you want any messages while I am up the street?"

My grandmother was English/Irish background, my grandfather was English/Welsh.

Cheers
JennieG

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Micca
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 08:56 AM

And of course James Joyce uses the expresion (all be it somewhat "massacred" as is the rest of the text) in Finnigans Wake

"Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen's maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback for messuages before joshuan judges had given us numbers
or Helviticus committed deuteronomy "

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: GUEST, topsie
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 10:53 AM

I've only come across it in Liverpool, but it could have arrived there from Ireland. My OED gives it in the plural as 'articles boiught on an errand, shopping. Chiefly Scottish. Early 20th century'.

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Micca
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 11:09 AM

I think, possibly, where I grew up (Limerick) the usage may have come from the practice of giving a small child a note wrapped round the money for the purchase, It was usually used for single items or a small number, usually to a nearby corner shop, often for stuff forgotten during "real shopping". sometimes a neigbour would ask a passing child to "go on a message" and the tradition was ( if it was not for family) then a "reward" of a penny (or a few pennies) would be given.

Subject: RE: BS: 'Going for Messages'
From: Rog Peek
Date: 17 Dec 09 - 06:48 PM

I've been reading a book called 'Stone Mad For Music' the Sliabh Luachra Story by Donal Hickey ISBN 1-86023-097-0. A fascinating story which maps the history of poetry, song, music amd dance in the Sliabh Luachra area which embraces a large part of east Kerry, north-west Cork and some of west Limerick.

One passage that describes a musician called Pat Coakley of Lyreatough talks of him heading "off for the house in Lisheen, carrying his meodeon in a message bag."

Presumably, a shopping bag.

Rog