“ad fontes!”
Australia, 1873—a refreshing sea-breeze that blows into Fremantle and Perth after hot weather, especially in the evening—Fremantle is a port city in Western Australia, near Perth—with reference to the action of an onshore breeze against diseases, ‘doctor’ denotes, in Western Australia and in the West Indies, a cool sea-breeze which usually prevails during part of the day in summer
Read MoreAustralia, 1919—a psychiatric asylum—seems to have originated in the slang of the armed forces during the First World War
Read MoreAustralia, 1939—someone whose presence spoils things for others; an odd person out—of unknown origin—perhaps a variant of ‘gooseberry’, as in ‘to play gooseberry’—perhaps an alteration of ‘gripe’—perhaps related in some respect to ‘sour grapes’
Read MoreThe obsolete Australian-English phrase to jump one’s horse over the bar, and its variants, meant to sell a horse for liquor. The following definition is from an unpublished manuscript entitled Materials for a dictionary of Australian Slang, collected from 1900 to 1910, by Alfred George Stephens and S. J. O’Brien—as quoted by Gerald Alfred Wilkes (1927-2020) in A […]
Read MoreAustralia, 1837—the deliberately slow pace of work characteristic of public-sector workers—originally used of convict labourers—in Australia as a penal colony, unease about the word ‘convict’ led to the creation of euphemistic terms such as ‘government man’ and ‘public servant’
Read MoreUSA, 1963—a female police officer or a female traffic warden—puns on ‘dick’, slang for a man’s penis, and the name of Dick Tracy, a comic-strip detective created in 1931 by the U.S. cartoonist Chester Gould
Read MoreAustralia, 1985—Coined after ‘corkage’, the noun ‘cakeage’ denotes, in a restaurant, the cutting and serving of a cake that has been brought in by a customer from off the premises, hence also a charge levied for this service.
Read MoreAustralia, 1902—of no use or advantage whatsoever, no good at all—origin unknown—alliterative effect and phonetical factors proper to Australia may have contributed to the currency of the phrase
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UK, 1819—has been used in various jocular phrases referring to alcohol consumption—punningly alludes to ‘lush’, which, as a noun, denotes alcoholic drink, and, as a verb, means to consume alcohol—‘the City of Lushington’: a convivial society, consisting chiefly of actors, which met at the Harp Tavern, London
Read MoreScotland, 1825 (as ‘bane idle’)—England, 1839—utterly lazy or indolent—‘bone’ seems to be used as an intensifier with adverbial force in the sense ‘through to the bone’, i.e., ‘deeply and fundamentally’
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word histories 