Swings and roundabouts

Posted by Brian from Shawnee on September 18, 2010 at 19:50

In Reply to: Swings and roundabouts posted by Victoria S Dennis on September 17, 2010 at 20:39:

: : I know that 'it's all swings and roundabouts' means - 'it's neither here nor there', but where did it actually originate from?

: The whole saying is "what you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts". It's originally a saying of fairground folk, and it means that a loss in one field [selling tickets for the swings] is balanced by profit in another [selling tickets for the roundabouts]. An early citation is "What's lost upon the roundabouts we pulls up on the swings" from a novel by P Chalmers, "Green Days & Blue Days", published 1912.

I met a guy from south Georgia (U.S.) who said "you make on the bacon and you lose on the eggs" to convey a similar idea.