MinxterBLOOM

Are they coming up daisies all around you? The perfect yellow disc in a fan collar of white petals. i went to a graduation party yesterday for a dear daisy of a young woman.  In her yard are some transplanted daisies from my yard.  In that new garden space, the upturned blossoms are so happy and earnest.

Upsidaisy
Upsa daesy
Upsy-daisy
Oops-a-daisy
Oopsy-daisy
Hoops-a-daisy

What do you say? Oops?  Perfect way to pick up a sleepy toddler.  Whoops a daisy is a bit different. If the milk spills, then Whoops! I think this phrase is the child's mea culpa -- a soft one and a yet a concrete one.  "Daisy" somehow undergirds the metaphor for uh oh.

Words and flowers. Sigh, such perfect partners.

I looked at several sources about oops-whoops a daisy.  Firstly, 

Clough Robinson's The Dialect of Leeds and its Neighbourhood, 1862:

Upsa daesy! a common ejaculation when a child, in play, is assisted in a spring-leap from the ground.

More than one hundred years earlier, Jonathan Swift places this country mouse phrase in a Stella poem:

Come stand away, let me rise... Is there a good fire? - So - up a-dazy.