Tell a yarn?

Reader question:

Please explain “tell a yarn” in this sentence: And no-one can tell a yarn like an Aussie.

My comments:

And no-one can tell a yarn like an Aussie?

Everybody from every country in the world can tell a tall tale, but no-one can tell it like an Aussie or Australian.

We don’t know what the conversation is about, but that’s its drift.

To “tell a yarn” means to tell a story, especially a long and tall one, one that is exaggerated, one that is imagined or at any rate one that is not entirely true.

That’s the idea being conveyed in the idiom “tell a yarn” or, more commonly, “spin a yarn”.

Yarn refers to spun thread, so, here, one’s thoughts and ideas are likened to threads. The story teller spins those thoughts and ideas into a long, unending tale, which is likened to a long piece of yarn.

So, Aussies can tell or spin a yarn better than people from other countries.

If it were true, then perhaps they had all learned this skill from their forebears. You see, when the first Aussies rowed their ships for the new territory from England, they all had time to kill because the journeys from Britain to the Down Under were long, not to mention perilous.

And what did they do to kill the time?

You’re right, by telling each other stories, the longer the stories the better.

I realize I run the risk of being accused of spinning a yarn on Australians, but I’m not making this up in its entirety. At least the journeys were long, not to mention perilous. And people might indeed have told each other tales while sailors mended ropes by, literally, spinning yarns.

This explanation, as pertaining to the origin of “spinning a yarn”, from Grammarist.com:

Most believe that the phrase spin a yarn was originally a nautical idiom in the 19th century. Seaman often had to spend time repairing rope onboard the ship. This time-consuming task involves twisting fibers together, which is alleged to have been referred to as “spinning yarn.”

While repairing rope, sailors would often tell each other stories to while away the time.

See?

All right, let’s read a few media examples of telling or spinning a yarn, the latter being the more frequently used version:

1. Some critics must be faster readers than me. The latest volume of Stephen Fry’s memoirs has been out for well over a week, but I have only just finished it. Boy is it a big book, taking us through the late 1980s and early 1990s, which will no doubt have been dubbed Fry’s cocaine years. As has been well-documented, the book lists all the famous places Fry snorted nose candy. Curiously there is no old school index, but presumably Kindle readers can do a search to find the juiciest bits.

Elsewhere the book drops names like they are going out of style. Prince Charles and Princess Diana visit Fry’s Norfolk gaff on New Year’s Day and Di whispers to Fry that she wants to get home in time to watch Spitting Image, which her in-laws hate. As far as I can recall Fry doesn’t take tea with Nelson Mandela, but he does hang out with a pretty diverse range of celebs, from Johnny Mills to Blur’s Alex James. He virtually seems to live in the Groucho – he once vomited out of the upstairs window after, or maybe during a heavy session, but luckily nobody was below at the time.

There are some surprises alongside the catalogue of familiar achievements. I didn’t realise Fry wrote bits of speeches for the Labour Party. There’s a lovely if hard-to-credit anecdote about being invited to dinner with Tony Blair – the invite says “informal”, which Fry correctly takes to mean a suit but not a tuxedo. Blair turns up in chinos and denim. Surely Blair, just as well brought up as Fry, would know all about etiquette too?

And of course Fry can tell a yarn. He has fantastic recall for quotes, events and little details. He doesn’t go too much into the nuts of bolts of how he can afford this lifestyle, but the diary pages that read like a list of lucrative voice-over gigs may offer a clue. I also seem to recall that he made a pile of dosh at a very early age from adapting Me & My Girl (the musical, not the old sitcom) for the stage.

…

This is, of course, a well-written book. But it is also a very big book, which it didn’t need to be. The opening eighty pages or so are a recap of his life so far, while a hefty chunk at the end is Palin-style diary entries with intermittent added footnotes. But the thing about Fry is that he is a larger-than-life figure, making huge sums of money, dining with the Great and the Good, hoovering up marathon lines of marching powder back in the day. He could hardly deliver a piddly paperback could he?

- Book Review: More Fool Me by Stephen Fry, by Bruce Dessau, BeyondTheJoke.co.uk, October 13, 2014.

2. Hours after Joe Biden launched his 2020 campaign by attacking President Trump for his response to a deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, the president began to spin a yarn.

The August 2017 demonstration was actually just a group of “neighborhood” folks from the local University of Virginia community who simply “wanted to protest the fact that they want to take down the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said in an interview with conservative radio host Mark Levin in late April.

Trump himself had merely been supporting those same purportedly peaceful protesters when he said there were “very fine people on both sides,” he continued.

In fact, the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville – which left one woman dead – was explicitly organized by a group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis as a celebration of white nationalism. The official event was presaged by a nighttime parade in which rallygoers held tiki torches aloft while chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil,” a reference to a nationalist slogan used in Nazi Germany.

“It is a misrepresentation of what was happening in Charlottesville to say it was a statue protest that went wrong,” said Nicole Hemmer, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center who lives in Charlottesville and attended the rally as an observer. “Anyone who was there that day would have walked into a park of people waving Nazi flags and people who were Klansmen. It was not a secret who put that rally on that day.”

For Trump, his recasting of Charlottesville is just the latest version of a story he has been altering and embellishing over the past 21 months in defense of one of the lowest points of his presidency, when he attracted bipartisan opprobrium for his seeming reluctance to forcefully condemn white supremacy. Even in his revisionist retelling, the president’s decision to lavish praise on Lee – a slave owner who led Confederate troops in defense of human bondage – leaves in place a level of ambiguity for those in his political base sympathetic to alt-right causes.

- How Trump has attempted to recast his response to Charlottesville, WashingtonPost.com, May 7, 2019.

3. We’re all human and we make mistakes from time to time. That said, Miami Heat commentator Eric Reid had a rough one on Tuesday night.

The Heat played the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday in Miami at the Kaseya Center. Late in the first half, the Warriors had possession and tried to cut into a three-point deficit. Reid began to spin a yarn about the Warriors’ Andrew Wiggins.

“Andrew Wiggins, a guy who averaged 18 points and nine rebounds a game in the 2022 NBA Finals, which they lost to the Celtics,” Reid said.

After a brief pause, he added, “Two years ago, it was Boston in six to win it all.”

That would all be well and good… if it actually happened that way.

History tells a different story than Reid’s version. The Warriors defeated the Boston Celtics in six games in the 2022 NBA Finals. Their victory gave them their fourth championship since the memorable 2015 season started their dynasty.

That’s a rough on-air gaffe, especially since Reid doubled down on his claim that Boston won, not Golden State. It’s not the first announcer flub, and it probably won’t be the last, either. It might not have been humorously done, but Reid will have to wear this one for a bit.

- Miami Heat announcer whiffs on remembering the 2022 NBA Finals, AwfulAnnouncing.com, March 27, 2024.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）