Idiom "hang up my gloves"

[Acharn]

Many years ago I followed the Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.thai. One of the members was a farang who lived in Thailand and whose knowledge of Thai just seemed phenomenal to me. In one thread he mentioned a conversation he had with an older Thai man who had commented, "I'm not young any more, but I haven't hung up my gloves yet." He was talking about his sexual activity (one slang term for a sexual encounter is "yok," or "round" in muay thai), but the more general meaning was that he was still active. For some reason that thread popped up in my memory today, but I can't remember the idiom used. Anybody know that one?

Edited September 19, 2015 by Acharn

[ezzra]

Hang the gloves refer to a retiring boxer, who's had enough and can't go on, how dose it relate

to sexual activities I have no idea, maybe he uses gloves when's doing it,,, who knows theses days....

[Johpa]

That was probably Gwyn on SCT, a really good fellow and the first linguist online to discuss Thai language in a public forum. We are nearing the 19th anniversary of Gwyn's far too early passing. As for how the phrase applies to sexual activity, well many of us over say 60 don't always having the plumbing working 100% of the time, but we don't give up trying after, to extend the metaphor, a loss or two.

[Acharn]

Don't think it was Gwyn. This fellow had worked for a trucking company in Chon Buri, training truck drivers. He identified himself for a time as living in Huay Khwang. This is really vague in my mind, but I think before that he was living in Saphan Khwai. The big difference was he was a person who enjoys talking to people, while I am the opposite, tending to isolate. My late wife was that way. Whenever we went to Bangkok and got into a taxi, before we had gone far she had found out about has family, what province he was from, why he was driving a cab, what problems cab drivers have, his opinion about Thaksin (every one of them I remember loved Thaksin except one, who had a verbal tic "I'm telling you"). He always said he had a wonderful teacher in Australia, but he learned new words all the time from people he interacted with. Really nice fellow. By the way, SCT had the best transliteration/transcription scheme I've ever encountered for Thai, took a little learning but did away with the ambiguities of trying to apply American or British or German orthography.

[RickBradford]

The verb would have been แขวน -- footballers are often described in the press as แขวนสตั๊ด 'to hang up his studs', ie hang up his boots.

[Maestro]

The way I read the OP, acharn is looking for the Thai idiom for hanging up one's gloves.

Do the posts of Sandy Cruden in the attached screen shot give the answer?

แขวนนวม To hang up the boxing gloves, to retire from the
ring. In LoS it's a euphemism for giving up sexual activity because
of old age.

Source: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/soc.culture.thai/siw6oifSE6U/zD3KKWNdPnoJ

[Acharn]

Yeah, Sandy from Huay Khwaang. That's where I saw it the first time. I really admired Sandy for his mastery of Thai and his ability to talk with people. I'm very socially inept and shy. Once I get started I'm OK, but starting a conversation is something I just don't know how to do. Don't even talk to the neighbors. I really enjoyed soc.culture.thai for many years, until the trolls made it unbearable. I had a wonderful kill filter program, but it only worked with the Agent usenet reader. I never understood why no other Windows newsgroup reader had a good kill filter. I could filter people based on their ip address, which is great when they're changing their handle ever day, or by using regular expressions, which I never found a use for. I think Unix newsreaders used to have that, don't know if the recent versions do, but it's moot. I'm not going back to usenet now.

Edited October 2, 2015 by Acharn