"Moaning Minnies"

[Kingetter]

A quick google will give the wartime definition of the phrase, but it gets used in another sense, like this maybe?

http://i70.photobucket.com/albums/i102/OpenandShut/Org/jra0133l.jpg

What other funny expressions can folk come up with that may have had another more serious connection?

[Ricco]

I thought a 'Moaning Minnie' was the term given to particular type of German shell because that was the noise it made as it travelled through the air? Maybe I am thinking of something else.:eek:

[Kingetter]

Yes, that was the original, but it is also applied to those that girn and moan all the time.

[willowbankbear]

When I was in the Hillhead primary school, we had a teacher who used to rant about the `nambie pambies` that banned the belt. Do you have a meaning for nambie pambies?:) There was a few times I was glad of these nambie pambies people in her class as I would have got a sore hand otherwise!!!

[Kingetter]

When I was in the Hillhead primary school, we had a teacher who used to rant about the `nambie pambies` that banned the belt. Do you have a meaning for nambie pambies?:) There was a few times I was glad of these nambie pambies people in her class as I would have got a sore hand otherwise!!!

Nothing like a diversion eh?

NAMBY-PAMBY
Feeble or effeminate in behaviour or expression.
We owe this word to a very public literary spat between the poets Alexander Pope and Ambrose Philips at the start of the eighteenth century. Pope hated Philips because political opponents such as Joseph Addison praised the latter’s rustic verses above his own. - http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-nam1.htm