Re: "Give it rice"

On Wed, 22 Feb 2006 12:59:48 +0100, trio@xxxxxxxxxx (Donna Richoux)
wrote:

Gary G. Taylor <notgary@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 12:44:23 +0000, Hairy Lethal wrote:

"Yeah! You give it rice."

I have heard it loads of times, but what the heck does it actually mean? I
have heard it use to encourage someone.

Perhaps it is just a local expression from the North of England!

Hm. This happens all the time: I read the first entry in a thread like
this and say to myself "Of course I know where this comes from"--and then
I read the rest of it and end up totally confused.

Well: Part of my background is motorcyclist, tending toward the "biker"
fringe, particularly that subset which despises Japanese motorcycles,
which are called "rice-burners." (I confess, I've owned only one Harley;
of my other bikes, two were Japanese and one was Italian. --Hey, they had
two wheels and they ran; I ain't complaining.) --And I can clearly
remember hearing someone complaining that his Japanese bike stopped
running, and someone else saying "Have you tried putting some rice in it?"
And of course I thought of that immediately. Well, there's another one
down the drain. (sigh)

So, a joking allusion to what powers Japanese motocycles? I like it, but
the clever explanations so often turn out to be false. Yet at the moment
we have no better theory.

We might be able to track down the age of "rice-burner."

However, where is it you're from? If it's not the North of England, then
there are questions of how the joke arose and spread.

Your Japanese connection accounts for the oddity of "rice," which is
somehow not a very traditional English thing. I kept twisting it to see
if it could have been "royce" or "rest" or anything but nothing
promising...

There is an article in Wikipedia which says various things about the
uses of "rice burner" to refer to cars and motorcycles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

Under Origin it says:
The use of the word "rice" refers to the fact that the vehicles
the term was originally applied to were of Japanese origin,
originated as a result of the heavy use of rice in East Asian
cuisine, and grew out of muscle car enthusiasts' jokes that cars
from Japan used engines powered by rice alcohol.

--
Peter Duncanson
UK (posting from a.u.e)
.

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