Donkey's years?

A posted comment on yesterday's post inquired as to the length of a donkey year. Hmmm. Yet another of those verbal leaps that I tend to make. I know what it means--a long time--but how in the world did that phrase come about? The answer to all things is obviously to google it. I did, and the explanation involves EARS, not YEARS--or maybe a little of both. My source traces it to cockney rhyming slang..."years and years" is translated to a rhyming phrase "donkey's ears". Over the years, "donkey's ears" was corrupted to "donkey's years". Who knew?

As long as I'm on origins of useful phrases, commonly used or not, there was another that surfaced this weekend. My husband and I took a letterpress printing class on Saturday, and were thrilled with the experience. We learned how to set type and convert our efforts to a hand-printed card. For bookish types like us, what a great chance to expand our knowledge base-- and particularly satisfying for me to write, choose a font, set type, choose paper and print my own poem. For those of us who are control freaks, being able to work through the whole process from start to finish was nothing short of nirvana. And JC was so taken that he is trying to figure out how we could possibly find space for a press of our own. Anyway, the individual pieces of type--i.e. the letters--are called "sorts". Thus, when a printer was setting type for a print job, and found himself short of certain letters toward the end, he was said to be "out of sorts". As I could well imagine when I nearly ran out of "w"s for my effort. We both had a great time. For avid readers like us, it truly gave us a new appreciation for the printed word that we have relied on all our lives for information, relaxation, and entertainment.

I guess this is not the right time to say that we just bought a Kindle electronic reader, huh? But that's a different story.