![]() By allowing himself to now do just that and delve deeper into joyful experiences, he added he had learned that they are just as complicated as darker emotions. In the past, Weeks said he also used the excuse that you shouldn’t question life’s joys as a way to avoid writing happier songs. “It was to achieve a lightness or a buoyancy. “I wanted that kind of cloud nine feeling with every song – that’s the job I gave myself and Nathan ,” he continued. “It just didn’t feel complete.” With no touring able to take place because of COVID-19 lockdowns, the musician started work on filling in the rest of his musical scrapbook, aided in his direction by a new “manifesto”. “I didn’t want to be the only scrapbooking of that experience,” Weeks told NME from his home in London. ‘Hop Up’, on the other hand, revels in the happiness, lightness and all-encompassing love after the baby’s birth. Both records detail Weeks’ experience of becoming a father, with ‘A Quickening’ documenting the anticipation, expectancy and insecurities he felt ahead of the arrival of his son. The album follows 2020’s ‘A Quickening’, and aims to fill in the gaps left by its predecessor. More crudely, if someone looks completely comfortable and happy in a situation, they are like a pig in muck.ĭo let me know if you can think of any other nice happiness phrases, or any interesting ones from your own language.As the former Maccabees frontman releases his second solo album ‘Hop Up’, Orlando Weeks has spoken to NME about the making of the joyful new record. If someone is happy in an enthusiastic and lively way, we can say they are like a dog with two tails, and if they have a self-satisfied air, they are like the cat that got the cream. All of these phrases are slightly old-fashioned now. It is thought that ‘Larry’ is the undefeated boxer Larry Foley (1849-1917), and that ‘sandboys’ were youths whose job was to deliver sand for the floors of inns, and who were ‘happy’ because they were often rewarded with alcohol! The American version is probably a shortening of ‘as happy as a clam at high tide’, i.e. There are several rather strange similes connected with happiness: Brits and Australians are as happy as Larry or as happy as a sandboy and Americans are as happy as a clam. Something that brightens up your day makes you feel happier, and if you revel in a situation or an activity, you get great pleasure from it. If someone has been sad but becomes more cheerful, we say that they cheer up or perk up. In British English, we also say that we are thrilled to bits. If you are extremely pleased about something that has happened, you can say that you can’t believe your luck. ![]() Moving away from height metaphors, In British and Australian English, we can say (rather sweetly, I always think) that someone in a generally happy mood is full of the joys of spring. Similarly, something that makes you feel happier is said to lift your spirits. ![]() We can say that we are walking/ floating on air, on top of the world or over the moon. Several other happiness idioms rely on the metaphorical idea of being in a very high place. ![]() In fact, you are in seventh heaven (from the belief in some religions that there are seven levels of heaven, the seventh being the highest). Still, it’s enough to know that if you are on cloud nine, you are extremely happy. Nobody really knows the origins of this phrase – one theory is that it refers to the cumulonimbus cloud that was number nine in the ‘International Cloud Atlas’ and rises higher than all other clouds, while another relates to one of the stages of enlightenment in Buddhist thought. ![]() Let’s start with the phrase I’ve used in the title: on cloud nine. My last post was all about sadness, so it is good to turn to a more cheerful subject: happiness. ![]()
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