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How about this? Some list I found. Apparently "figures out of 100, based on a brief conversation" lol.gif )

 

92 Moving house

90 Breaking up (15-20, 38-70)

89 Death in family

88 Children

82 Exams

81 Dreaming about exams

79 Injury/illness

78 Public speaking

76 Impotence

74 People talking to you when you're on the phone to someone else

72 Balloon rides (?!??)

72 Job interview

69 Box junctions

68 Christmas

67 Getting caught masturbating

67 Changing job

66 Breaking up (ages 21-37, 71+)

62 Cooking for others

59 Urinating in public

54 Waiting to laugh at a punchline you already know.

 

I like that last one. But over half people say that?! lol.gif

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I like moving house. I don't find it particularly stressful.

 

Exams, dreaming about exams, Christmas, and many of those other things are much worse.

 

Not knowing why your carrots won't grow can be a real nail-biter too.

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Can't say I've ever known the carrots not to grow...

 

But if me organic 'erbs don't sprout soon, I'll probably be chewing down on the ol' green fingernails meself.

 

As for stressful things, my move to Oz has been a weird mix of the most stressful and the most relaxing experiences of life to date.

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Getting up early when you just want to sleep a little more...and then having to rush to work... only to pretend that you're not as knackered as your students freely admit to being clap.gif . Isn't it winter soon?

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Just looked up kettle of fish, interesting

 

[Q] From Heather Rechtman; Geoff Genford: “What is the origin of the expression that’s a different kettle of fish? Is it British or American?”

[A] It’s originally British.

There are actually two common idioms based around the phrase a kettle of fish. One is yours, which means “This is a different matter from the one previously mentioned”. The other is more of an exclamation: either as a pretty kettle of fish! or a fine kettle of fish!, meaning that some awkward state of affairs has arisen. The latter is much older, dating from the eighteenth century, while yours is twentieth-century and seems to be derived from it.

Nobody is really sure where the expression comes from, but we do know that the phrase a kettle of fish was originally a literal term. These days, especially in Britain and Commonwealth countries, we think of a kettle as a small enclosed container with a handle and spout for boiling water to make our tea. (I believe that Americans are less familiar with this essential item of kitchenware.) In the eighteenth century, though, a kettle was any large vessel used to boil stuff in.

There was, it seems, a custom by which the gentry on the Scottish border with England would hold a picnic (though that term was not then known) by a river. The custom was described by Thomas Newte in his Tour of England and Scotland in 1785: “It is customary for the gentlemen who live near the Tweed to entertain their neighbours and friends with a Fete Champetre, which they call giving ‘a kettle of fish’. Tents or marquees are pitched near the flowery banks of the river ... a fire is kindled, and live salmon thrown into boiling kettles”.

What puzzles scholars is how this literal reference became an idiom—assuming, of course, that the phrase comes from the custom, which is far from certain. There is a clue in early examples, in which the term was used in the sense of a mess, muddle or confusion caused by one’s own misguided actions. For example, in Captain Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1811, it’s explained like this: “When a person has perplexed his affairs in general, or any particular business, he is said to have made a fine kettle of fish of it”. And a little later, Thomas Chandler Haliburton of Nova Scotia used it the same way in his Clockmaker: “There’s an end to the Clock trade now, and a pretty kettle of fish I’ve made of it, haven’t I? I shall never hear the last on it”.

Could it be that the contents of the kettles of fish looked messy after the fish had broken up under the influence of the boiling water? It would make sense of the early examples. But that’s just a guess.

Subscriber Henk Rietveld wrote to say that he had heard, while working in Newfoundland, that kettle of fish was a corruption of quintal of fish, a measure either of 100 pounds or a hundredweight. This is possible, since quintal was also known in the forms kintal and kentle in Newfoundland and New England, the last of which could easily have been misheard as kettle. It can’t be ruled out as a possibility, since the quintal was the usual way of measuring fish catches. Against it is the important point that the idiom kettle of fish seems to have been known first in Britain but that kentle is an American form.

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