Folk sayings, Irish, “Shift your feet, lose your seat,” folklore saying

Genre: Folk sayings, Irish                                      
Sineád Dinsmore,
September, 8, 2001

                                                                       

“Shift your feet, lose your seat,”

“Speak up now, or forever hold your peace.”

Sineád said that the saying, “shift your feet, lose your seat,” was used as method of managing the family pecking order, especially when they were all watching TV and if someone got up to use the bathroom, they’d lose their seat. Apparently there was no way of putting “dibs” back on the seat once you left it. 

Usually, the rule of thumb in our extended family was that someone with full bladder would lay future claim to a soon-to-be vacated seat, which was honored. But in Sineád’s family, that law changed. I think it’s because her mother, my aunt Canice remarried, and the old pecking order rules were suspended when the new family came along.

Sineád, who lives in Nicasio, Ca., said she learned this saying from her mother, Canice, probably when they were living in Petaluma in the 1980s. The family had expanded from herself and one older brother, to a total of four, with the addition of her two half-brothers to the family. As the younger boys grew older, sibling rivalry intensified and crowd control had become a central issue as they all jockeyed for positions of power.

I was more familiar with a somewhat related saying, “Speak up now, or forever hold your peace.” Our Irish-born grandmother, Jennie Walsh Reilly (b. 1893 in Bantry Bay), taught it to me when I was about seven or eight, circa 1960, in Forest Knolls, Ca. She usually said that whenever I waffled on something. Since we had two couches and there was only myself, my little brother and my grandmother in the house, pecking order issues were less severely delineated.