them's the facts
English
WOTD – 6 December 2016
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Pronunciation
Audio (AU) (file)
Phrase
them's the facts
- (idiomatic, colloquial) Those are the facts, that's the truth, that's how it is.
- 1911, Vaughan Kester, “Law at Balaam's Cross-roads”, in The Prodigal Judge, Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill Company, OCLC 284963; republished Fairfield, Ind.: 1st World Library Literary Society, 2006, ISBN 978-1-4218-1813-9, page 44:
- The boy was left with Bob Yancy mainly because nobody else would take him. Them's the facts. Now go on!
- 1965, Dudley Pope, Ramage, a Novel, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, OCLC 5735281:
- ‘Them’s the facts!’ said Brown, taking little trouble to hide his contempt for anyone so stupid as not to understand. ‘The orficers were killed. Couldn’t see it with me own glims ’cos I couldn’t be everywhere at once. But they was dead all right.’
- 2007, Homer Hickam, The Far Reaches: A Novel, New York, N.Y.: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, →ISBN, page 83:
- I know you're worn out. I am too. It's too damn hot and I've forgotten what fresh water tastes like. Them's the facts. But let's just make it easy on ourselves and get this thing done and then we'll all get on back to the beach and off to the islands of nooky-nooky.
- 1911, Vaughan Kester, “Law at Balaam's Cross-roads”, in The Prodigal Judge, Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill Company, OCLC 284963; republished Fairfield, Ind.: 1st World Library Literary Society, 2006, ISBN 978-1-4218-1813-9, page 44:
Usage notes
The phrase is frequently used in reference to an unfortunate truth.
While the uses of them as a subject pronoun and of 's with a plural subject are mainly found only in a few nonstandard dialects, they appear in other dialects in certain fixed colloquialisms such as this one, as what might be called “intentionally incorrect” speech.