“Ad fontes!”
Australia—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 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.
Read MoreUK, 1912—humorous: a Jewish person—refers to the Crossing of the Red Sea, as recounted in the Book of Exodus—coined on various occasions by different persons, independently from each other
Read MoreThere have been, since the early 20th century a number of colourful variants of the U.S. phrase ‘as busy as a one-armed paperhanger’—for example, in Australian English, ‘as busy as a one-armed taxi-driver with crabs’ and ‘as busy as a brickie in Beirut’.
Read MoreAustralia, 1909—to the greatest possible extent; sated with food—dolls used to have modelled wax heads with a neck shaped so that it could be sewn to a stuffed rag body
Read More
word histories 