‘not to know whether it’s Tuesday or Bourke Street’: meaning and origin
Australia, 1952—used of a state of confusion or stupidity—refers to Bourke Street, in Melbourne, Victoria
Read MoreCategory: Australia & New Zealand
‘sleeping policeman’ | ‘gendarme couché’
a raised band across a road, designed to make motorists reduce their speed—1961—based on the image of a policeman lying asleep in the middle of a road—in early use often with reference to Jamaica
Read More‘flopbuster’: meaning and origin
a film which fails to achieve the commercial success that was expected—UK, 1986—from ‘flop’ (a failure) and ‘-buster’ in ‘blockbuster’ (a film which achieves great commercial success)
Read More‘back o’ Bourke’: meaning and origin
a remote and sparsely populated inland area of Australia—1896, in a poem by William Henry Ogilvie—refers to Bourke, the most remote town in north-western New South Wales
Read More‘ugly duckling’: meaning and origin
a person or thing, initially ugly or unpromising, that changes into something beautiful or admirable—New Zealand, 1848—from Hans Christian Andersen’s story about a supposed ugly duckling that turns out to be a swan
Read More‘glory box’: meaning and origin
a box in which a young woman stores clothes and household articles in preparation for her marriage—Australia, 1902—perhaps related to the British ‘glory hole’, denoting a place for storing odds and ends
Read More‘to rain pitchforks (with their points downwards)’: meaning and origin
to rain very heavily—UK, 1820—sometimes appended to the phrase ‘to rain cats and dogs’
Read More‘Mexican overdrive’: meaning and origin
the practice of coasting downhill in a motor vehicle, with the engine disengaged—USA, 1949, lorry-drivers’ slang—one of the phrases in which ‘Mexican’ denotes basic devices or processes compared unfavourably with more advanced equivalents
Read More‘sex and shopping’: meaning and origin
a genre of popular fiction featuring wealthy and glamorous characters who typically engage in frequent sexual encounters and extravagant spending—USA, 1985 & 1986, in reference to British novelist Jackie Collins and U.S. novelist Judith Krantz
Read More‘to (play) hide the sausage’: meaning and origin
to have sexual intercourse—UK, Ireland and Australia, second half of the 20th century—here, the noun ‘sausage’ denotes the penis
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