‘dine and dash’: meanings and origin
USA, 1975—to hastily or furtively leave a restaurant, cafe, etc., in order to avoid paying for one’s bill—also used as a noun, especially as a modifier—has also been used of meals eaten quickly
Read MoreCategory: public affairs
‘six o’clock swill’: meaning and origin
Australia, 1944—the customary bout of hasty drinking in public houses at the end of the working day, occasioned by the former six-o’clock-closing regulations
Read More‘sly grog’: meaning and origin
Australia, 1825—liquor sold without a licence—here, the adjective ‘sly’ means ‘secret’, ‘covert’, ‘clandestine’
Read More‘to talk through (the back of) one’s neck’
1890s—to use extravagant words or language not substantiated by fact; to talk nonsense—occurs in particular in stories by the British authors Ernest William Hornung (1866-1921) and Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975)
Read More‘get on your bike’ (exhortation to take action)
UK—since 1981, has been associated with a speech by the Employment Secretary, Norman Tebbit, at the Conservative Party conference, in which he exhorted the unemployed to go and find work, like his father, who had “got on his bike and looked for work”
Read More‘999’ (British emergency telephone number)
‘999’ denotes the telephone number used to contact the emergency services in the United Kingdom. This telephone number was introduced in 1937 by Walter Womersley, who was then the Assistant Postmaster-General.
Read More‘barbecue stopper’: meaning and origin
Australia—a controversial current-affairs topic—the image is that such a topic is likely to interrupt a barbecue with loud debate—coined in 2001 by the Australian Prime Minister John Howard during his re-election campaign
Read More‘interview without coffee’: meaning and origin
UK, 1990—a British-Army euphemism for a severe reprimand by a senior officer—also, by extension, any ‘dressing-down’
Read More‘to spit the dummy’: meanings and origin
Australia, 1979—to lose one’s temper or composure; to give up contesting or participating—the image is of a baby spitting out its dummy in a tantrum
Read More‘a shag on a rock’: meaning and origin
Australia, 1843—used as a type of the isolated, deprived or exposed—refers to a shag (i.e., a cormorant) perched alone on a rock
Read More
word histories 