Caught Pinkhanded.
I went out for a picture-taking walk in the backyard and found Kayla and her daddy already taking a walk. Kayla very sheepishly ran over to me.
"Grandma, I FOUND this pretty flower. Can I have it? "
No, I don't correct her grammar to say "May I" just now - It would spoil the moment.
"Yes, Sweet Pea, you can have it. Go inside and put it in a glass of water."
I encourage the girls to stop and smell the flowers. And sometimes they sneak a pick . And that's okay with me.
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* The famous Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott popularised the term "
redhanded", which was until his time purely a Scots expression. He used it first in his novel Ivanhoe of 1819: “I did but tie one fellow, who was taken redhanded and in the fact, to the horns of a wild stag”. Before then it was usually written as red-hand or redhand as in “if he be taken redhand”. It dates back to the fifteenth century.
The meaning was then the same as now. Somebody taken redhand was either in the act of committing a crime or with clear evidence of it about him. The original reference was to literal red hands, those of a murderer stained with the blood of his victim. But it soon became broadened to refer figuratively to other crimes, for example to a thief being caught carrying stolen items.
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World Wide Words
