“Ad fontes!”
UK, 1971—a pun on ‘Kensington Gore’, the name of a thoroughfare in London, and on the noun ‘gore’, denoting blood shed from a wound—it is unclear whether ‘Kensington Gore’ (as applied to artificial blood) was originally a trademark
Read Morea tall person—Australia, 1968, in the stage play Norm and Ahmed, by Alexander Buzo—gained currency from occurring in the film Gallipoli (1981), scripted by David Williamson
Read MoreAustralia—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 MoreUSA, 1957, teenagers’ slang—to worry about trivial, insignificant matters—usually as ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’, said as reproof or consolation
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Australia, 1954—derogatory nickname for the metal eagle at the top of the Australian-American Memorial in Canberra—alludes to the fact that, from a distance, the eagle’s upswept wings look like a rabbit’s ears
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UK—1969: a type of collapsible trolley designed for use in the home—1970: a thing whose name the speaker cannot remember, does not know, or does not wish to mention—perhaps from ‘oojah’, ‘-ma-’ in nouns such as ‘thingamabob’, and the verb ‘flip’
Read MoreAustralia, 1954—extremely ugly; extremely tired—the noun ‘sandshoe’ denotes a light canvas shoe with a rubber sole
Read Moreno money, nothing—UK, 1864, in a text by the British scholar D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson—from ‘n-’ in the determiner ‘no’, meaning ‘not any’, and ‘-uppence’ in ‘tuppence’
Read MoreUSA, 1959—a very tidy, well-organised person—a blend of the adjective ‘neat’ and of the noun ‘beatnik’—originally occurred chiefly in contrast to ‘beatnik’
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