“ad fontes!”
USA, 1973—a suburban mother who spends a lot of time taking her children to play soccer or engage in similar activities—popularised during the presidential election campaign of 1996 as designating an influential voting bloc
Read Morea lively but ineffectual young upper-class man—UK, 1959—apparently coined in the 1950s by the British jazz manager James Godbolt after ‘Hoorah Henry’, coined in 1936 by the U.S. author Alfred Damon Runyon
Read MoreAustralia, 1834—used in various phrases, in particular as a type of someone or something in a very bad state or condition—also in the phrase ‘all behind like Barney’s bull’, meaning ‘very delayed’ or ‘backward’—origin unknown
Read Morea country characterised by absurdity—originally used of Czechoslovakia—the suffix ‘-istan’ (in country names such as ‘Pakistan’) is used as the second element in satirical names denoting, in particular, ‘a country characterised by [the first element]’
Read MoreAustralia—also ‘to bang like a shithouse door’—used of an exceptional sexual partner—plays on two meanings of the verb ‘bang’: ‘to make a loud noise’ and ‘to have sexual intercourse’
Read Moresuicide committed by a person, especially a child or young adult, as a result of being bullied—blend of the nouns ‘bully’ and ‘suicide’—coined since 2001 on separate occasions by various persons, independently from one another
Read MoreAustralia, 1972—a jocular curse—the Australian National Dictionary Centre explains that this phrase “recalls an earlier time when many Australians kept chooks (domestic chickens) in the backyard and the dunny was a separate outhouse”
Read MoreThe noun ‘dunny’ denotes a toilet, especially an outside toilet. This noun has been used in various phrases expressing notions such as conspicuousness, loneliness, ill luck, etc.
Read MoreThe proverbial phrase ‘if it should rain pottage, he would want his dish’, and its many variants, are used of a person who is characterised by bad luck or by an inability to be organised or prepared.
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(plural) the Australian men’s national soccer team; (singular) a member of this team—originated in 1972 as the name of the mascot of the Australian men’s national soccer team, created for the 1974 FIFA World Cup
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