television programmes that are gratuitously shocking or sensational, or of poor quality—from their eliciting in the viewer a similar horrified fascination to that experienced by people watching scenes of cars crashing
Read More
UK and USA, 1908: applied to a pair of trousers much too large for the wearer—later also applied to small cars and to socks much too large for the wearer
Read More
conveys derisive self-congratulation for an action that the speaker has done from a sense of duty rather than for pleasure—from a line uttered by Charles Laughton in the 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII
Read Moreused to rebuke an unrealistic conditional—USA, 1808: ‘if my aunt had been my uncle, what would have been her gender?’—France, 1843: ‘si ma tante était un homme, ça serait mon oncle’ (‘if my aunt were a man, that would be my uncle’)
Read More
USA, 1938: painted by teenagers on the dilapidated old cars they drove—Australia, 1948: painted on cars, too, but, apparently, not specifically by teenagers—later, on bumper stickers
Read Morethe three traditional interests of the stereotypical New-Zealand man—it seems, however, that in early use the phrase was applied to both sexes—1963 in a U.S. newspaper
Read MoreUSA, 1925—With, of course, a pun on ‘pee’, meaning ‘to urinate’, the jocular phrase ‘silent like (the) ‘p’ in swimming’ is used when exposing a difficulty in pronunciation.
Read More
theatre—a typical entrance or exit line given to a young man in a superficial drawing-room comedy—USA 1934—but 1908 in a short story evoking the pastimes of members of the leisured class during a stay at a country house
Read MoreAmerican English, 1823—meaning: if one is falsely reputed to act in a specific manner, then one may as well act in that manner
Read More(baseball) a good fielder, but a poor hitter, i.e., batter—USA, 1925—purportedly coined in 1924 by Miguel Gonzales to describe Moe Berg in a telegram to Mike Kelley
Read More