‘cut-lunch commando’: meaning and origin
Australia, 1943, derogatory—a soldier who does not see active service, especially a reservist—from ‘cut lunch’, denoting a packed lunch, typically consisting of sandwiches
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‘to paint someone into a corner’: meanings and origin
USA, 1929: to force someone into a situation from which it is not easy to escape—the image is of someone who is painting a floor and ends up in a corner of the room with wet paint all around them (USA, 1913)
Read More‘like a lily on a dustbin’: meanings and early occurrences
also ‘like a lily on a dirt-tin’ and variants—something or somebody that is incongruous or conspicuous—UK, 1934, but chiefly Australian (from 1948 onwards)
Read More‘to stir the possum’: meaning and origin
Australia, 1888—to stir up controversy; to liven things up—also ‘to rouse the possum’ (Australia, 1898)—this phrase probably developed as the obverse of ‘to play possum’
Read More‘to jockey for position’: meanings and origin
literally, of a jockey in horseracing (USA, 1869): to manoeuvre in order to get one’s horse into a desired position at the beginning of a race—figuratively (USA, 1881): to manoeuvre in order to gain advantage over rivals in a competitive situation
Read More‘pound shop’: meanings and origin
UK & Ireland—a shop that sells a wide range of goods at low prices, typically one pound or less—hence also: of the type or quality found in a pound shop, cheap, second-rate
Read Morea British use of ‘satellite alley’
1990—a street in which many satellite dishes are attached to the front of the buildings—‘satellite dish’: a bowl-shaped antenna used to view satellite television
Read More‘knocker-up’ (a wakener-up)
Ireland & Britain, 1850—a person who goes round the streets in the early morning to awaken factory hands—from ‘to knock somebody up’, meaning ‘to awaken somebody by knocking at the door’
Read More‘(as) poor as Job’s cat’: meaning and origin
‘extremely poor’—USA, 1810—humorous variant of ‘(as) poor as Job’, from the name of the eponymous protagonist of a book of the Old Testament, taken as the type of extreme poverty
Read More‘scholasticide’: meaning and origin
the systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel—apparently coined in 2009 by Karma Nabulsi, Fellow in Politics at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford
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