‘the whole box and dice’: meaning and origin
Australia, 1828—Ireland, 1832—a group of things or people in its entirety—‘box’ refers to a box from which dice are thrown in gaming or gambling
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‘to be a box of birds’: meaning and origin
Australia and New Zealand, 1939—to be in good spirits, ‘chirpy’—the image is of a boxful of chirping birds (cf. the extended form ‘happy as a bird in a box of birdseed’)—New-Zealand variant ‘to be a box of fluffy ducks’, also ‘to be a box of fluffies’
Read More‘to be not so green as one is cabbage-looking’
Australia, 1865—to be less of a fool than one appears to be—this phrase plays on two uses of the adjective ‘green’: 1) denoting the colour of growing vegetation, grass, etc. 2) denoting an inexperienced or naive person
Read More‘budgie smugglers’: meaning and origin
Australia, 1998—a pair of short, tight-fitting men’s swimming trunks—refers to the appearance of the male genitals in figure-hugging trunks—‘budgie’: colloquial abbreviation of ‘budgerigar’, denoting a small Australian parrot
Read More‘can eat an apple through a picket fence’ and variants
used of a buck-toothed person—USA, 1933, as ‘can eat an apple through a picket fence’—USA, 1950, as ‘can eat an apple through a tennis racquet’—UK, 1979, as ‘can eat an apple through a letter box’
Read More‘Buckley’s (chance): meaning and origin
Australia, 1887—a forlorn hope, no prospect whatever—may refer to the British convict William Buckley (1780-1856), who escaped from custody in 1803 and lived for thirty-two years with Aboriginal people
Read More‘to spin a yarn’: meaning and origin
UK and USA, 1816—to tell a long, far-fetched story—of nautical origin? (perhaps alludes to making ropes from lengths of yarn on board ship: the men would have told one another stories while performing this long and tedious task)
Read More‘Paris syndrome’: meaning and origin
1992—the culture shock experienced by an individual (typically a Japanese) who, when visiting, or living in, Paris, realises that this city does not fulfil their idealised expectations—apparently a loan translation from Japanese ‘Pari shōkōgun’, coined by Japanese psychiatrist Hiroaki Ōta
Read More‘knuckle-sandwich’ | ‘knuckle-butty’: meanings and origin
‘knuckle-sandwich’ USA, 1940—‘knuckle-butty’ UK, 1972—a punch to the mouth (or to the stomach)—the image is of a sandwich of knuckles being forced into the mouth (or into the stomach) of the person who is punched
Read More‘fang-farrier’: meaning and origin
a dentist—World War Two—slang of the British armed forces—was soon adopted into (and came to be regarded as) Australian English—earlier synonyms: ‘fang-faker’ and ‘fang-wrencher’
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