The title is a phrase my dad used to say to me when I was a child (50 odd years ago!) and it was bed time; if I was watching something on TV and wouldn’t see the end I’d ask him in the morning what happened – the above is what he’d say to me! He’s gone now, so I can’t ask him directly. Anyone heard of this?
4 comments
Is it a reference to the Titanic?
My initial thought was that it reminds me of the Titanic. The band played and they all drowned sort of thing.
But getting your feet wet is also a euphemism for getting practice, kind of like ‘wet behind the ears’. So maybe it’s just an old turn of phrase which means ‘something happened and they all learned something from the experience’.
It sounds like the sort of ritual answer that families develop and pass on well past the point where anybody can remember what the original referents were, so he might well not have been able to tell you himself (although the film A Night To Remember might well have come into that one).
(I invented the word “oikolect” for this phenomenon when, newly married in the early 1990s, we discovered we had entirely different family-tradition responses to someone exclaiming that food was hot – “it’s been in a hot place” vs. “it’s supposed to be a merit”), which has obtained a modest hold as far as I can see from google, although “familect” may be more common)
‘ and the band played on’ was quite a common phrase used by adults to kids back in the day, but I’ve not heard the bit about feet getting wet, that could just be your dad’s personal addition to the phrase! I think it’s really quirky.
Someone else mentioned the old story about the band continuing to play on the Titanic as the ship went down…so yes, it could be a reference to that too.