Go Fry Ice

Kathleen from Ithaca, New York, remembers her mother saying Go fry ice! meaning “Bug off!” It’s probably a minced oath replacing a phrase that exhorts the hearer to go do something else that starts with F. The earliest known recorded use of Go fry ice was in 1929 in a wildly popular, serialized novel by Ruth Dewey Groves called Rich Girl Poor Girl, later published as a book. Other phrases that mean the same thing: go fly a kite, go fly a kite in a telephone booth, go fry an egg, and go fry your face. A Yiddish saying along these lines translates as “Go whistle in the ocean.” This is part of a complete episode.