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Can anybody explain Warren Buffett's sentence for me, please?

"The only time to buy these is on a day with no 'y' in it."

haile
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1 Answers1

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Since every day (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday...) ends in "y", this is a time which cannot occur. In other words, the expression "on a day with no 'y' in it' is a way to say "never".

You can also find the opposite "on a day ending with a 'y'" (or similar) to mean something like everyday.

eques
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    There was a similar saying in the UK (before household fridges were common) that some types of food should not be eaten "when there is no R in the month" - i.e. in May, June, July, and August when the temperature (and particularly the overnight temperature) was likely to be high and spoil the food. All the other month names from September through to April do contain the letter R. – alephzero Oct 02 '17 at 14:35
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    @alephzero I've lived in the UK all of my life and the only time that I've ever heard of not eating anything when there isn't an 'R' in the month is for oysters and that is nothing to do with refrigeration. Its because oysters are out of season during their breeding season which is basically months without an 'R' in the name. Can you provide a reference? – MD-Tech Oct 02 '17 at 15:47
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    The typical usage for the "everyday" variant (in my experience) is "only on days ending in 'y'," with a bit of emphasis on the "only", to highlight the irony. – Dan Henderson Oct 02 '17 at 15:47
  • @MD-Tech presumably that would because refrigerators have been common in the UK for most of living memory by now. – eques Oct 02 '17 at 16:56
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    Note that there's a heavy implication of sarcasm in either expression. – chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic- Oct 02 '17 at 16:57
  • maybe not sarcasm, but less than actually serious – eques Oct 02 '17 at 17:11
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    No sarcasm in Do you drink beer? Only on days ending in 'y'. – AbraCadaver Oct 02 '17 at 19:43
  • @MD-Tech No reference, but in the days when people in rural areas kept a "family" pig that was slaughtered and preserved for meat over winter without refrigeration, it was a commonplace saying that everyone knew. That still being done when I was a kid in the 1950s. In any case, those were seriously large pigs - how many people even today have domestic freezers that could chill 600 or 700 pounds of freshly killed meat quickly enough to be safe? – alephzero Oct 03 '17 at 01:03
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    @MD-Tech the aphorism "don't eat raw oysters in months without an 'R' months (aka the warm water May thru August) because of diseases like Vibrio in the water where the oysters grow" is also well-known in Louisiana. – RonJohn Oct 03 '17 at 02:16
  • @alephzero that's what making ham and bacon is for, though even if you preserved or bartered all of your meat, part of the economic value in a family pig is that it was eaten through the winter, so you'd still not want to slaughter it before the nights started to stretch longer. – Jon Hanna Oct 03 '17 at 15:43
  • @alephzero Your saying doesn't work very well, because September is significantly warmer than May in the UK. So the months to avoid perishable food should be June, July, August and September. – Mike Scott Oct 03 '17 at 19:27
  • @MikeScott alephzero speaks from personal experience and describes a folklore expression, which doesn't always reflect "optimal" conditions. Plus, if the expression is connected with foods preserved over winter, there likely wouldn't be anything left by September – eques Oct 03 '17 at 19:55
  • But what about tomorrow? Oh yeah, always a day away. – DSway Oct 04 '17 at 01:46
  • @MD-Tech Growing up in the German countryside, we had a similar saying about when to harvest Rhubarb: only in months without an R in it. This seemingly has to do with the varying oxalic acid content (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb#Toxicity), though I find it hard to verify this "old wives' rule". – 2v0mjdrl Oct 04 '17 at 07:12
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    This was also heard a lot in Australia, where advertisements for the company "Yellow Cabs" had the slogan "Only call a Yellow Cab on days that end in 'y'" – the6p4c Oct 04 '17 at 12:40