[Idiom] It pulls!

[Julie17]

Has anybody ever heard the expression "It pulls." in the sense of "There's a draught."? - Apart from Germans using a false friend, of course. ;-)

 

[bhaisahab]

Has anybody ever heard the expression "It pulls." in the sense of "There's a draught."? - Apart from Germans using a false friend, of course. ;-)

No, I've never heard it.

 

[Julie17]

Thanks!

 

[BobSmith]

Has anybody ever heard the expression "It pulls." in the sense of "There's a draught."? - Apart from Germans using a false friend, of course. ;-)

Can someone explain the humor here?

 

[BobK]

Has anybody ever heard the expression "It pulls." in the sense of "There's a draught."? - Apart from Germans using a false friend, of course. ;-)

Your suggestion seems apt. But the association of 'draught' with 'pulling' has existed in English for many years; a 'draught horse' is one that pulls. BNC has many hits for a noun following 'draught', but more than half of the top 10 are about pulling. ('Draught beer' was so called because of the way it was extracted from the barrel. Many English pubs still have levers on the bar, and serving draught beer is often called 'pulling a pint'. [Tangentially relevant memory: the advertising slogan for one brand of beer many years ago was the multiply punning 'There's a terrific draught at your local.'])

1 DRAUGHT . 47
2 DRAUGHT GUINNESS 39
3 DRAUGHT , 30
4 DRAUGHT ANIMALS 17
5 DRAUGHT BEER 14
6 DRAUGHT ANIMAL 12
7 DRAUGHT BEERS 10
8 DRAUGHT BITTER 9
9 DRAUGHT EXCLUDERS 8
10 DRAUGHT EXCLUDER 7
....

See more here: British National Corpus (BYU-BNC)

I have a vague memory that the rustic characters in Wuthering Heights (my chief source of Yorkshire dialect ;-)) referred to a fire 'pulling'; older speakers of English talk about a fire 'drawing'.

So a German false friend is quite possible; but it's also possible that this use of 'pulls' still survives in some dialects.

b

 

[Tdol]

I haven't heard it either.

 

[BobK]

Can someone explain the humor here?

There's no humour. It's just a reference to the German for 'There's a draught'.

b