It's all just swings and roundabouts

Well, this week Squid on the grill comes to you from sunny Sugarland, Texas. This is a town just outside of Houston. I'm down here for business. A petrochemical plant in Qatar is buying a paging/alarm system from my company's Italian subsidiary. This is being organized by a U.S. company, which is working with a British company. Confused? Me too.

Anyway, one of the British guys comes from Cirencester, a town very close to where I grew up. It has been good to spend some time with someone from "the old country", and I quickly bounced back into the way I used to speak.

Trouble is, one of my colleagues is having a hard time with some of the more colorful expressions being used. He keeps looking at me with a "huh" expression, and I have to translate. See if you can do any better. Below are three of the expressions causing difficulties, with the translation in new "Inviso-text" (thanks, TV Guy). Simply click and drag your mouse pointer past the "Translation:" for the answer.

Here goes:

It's all just swings and roundabouts

Translation: Swings and roundabouts is a shortened version of the fairground proverb 'What you lose on the swings you win on the roundabouts', current from the beginning of the twentieth century in various forms. It is used to mean that things will balance out in the end.

Move the speakers up a noggin

Translation: A noggin is a person's head, so to move something "a noggin" is to move it a small distance, i.e. a head's length.

We'll need to do a little jiggery-pokery

Translation: Jiggery-pokery is defined as underhanded manipulation or dealings.

Well, there you have it. Other terms such as "queue" (for "line") came up while we were waiting to get into a restaurant. I suggested that "If we do a little jiggery-pokery, we might be able to shorten the queue a noggin. After all, it's all just swings and roundabouts."