‘back o’ Bourke’: meaning and origin
a remote and sparsely populated inland area of Australia—1896, in a poem by William Henry Ogilvie—refers to Bourke, the most remote town in north-western New South Wales
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‘blue funk’ (American usage)
a state of depression or despair—1893—a shift in meaning of the British-English expression ‘blue funk’, denoting a state of extreme nervousness or dread (the original meaning in American English)
Read More‘wheelie bin’: meaning and origin
UK, 1983—a large, rectangular dustbin with a hinged lid and wheels on two of the corners—bins on wheels were introduced into the United Kingdom in 1980 on the model of what was done in the Federal Republic of Germany
Read More‘glory box’: meaning and origin
a box in which a young woman stores clothes and household articles in preparation for her marriage—Australia, 1902—perhaps related to the British ‘glory hole’, denoting a place for storing odds and ends
Read More‘bottom drawer’: meaning and origin
a young woman’s collection of clothes and household articles, kept in preparation for her marriage—UK, 1835?—refers to the (notional?) receptacle where those clothes and household articles are supposed to be kept
Read More‘drama queen’: meaning and origin
(derogatory) a person who is prone to exaggeratedly dramatic behaviour—UK, 1978
Read More‘pipsqueak’: meanings and origin
a person or thing that is insignificant or contemptible—1910—originally (1900): a type of small high-velocity shell, with reference to the high-pitched sound of its discharge and flight
Read More‘in full fig’: meaning and origin
smartly dressed—from the verb ‘fig out/up’, meaning ‘to smarten up’—this verb is probably an alteration of the verb ‘feague’, of uncertain origin, meaning ‘to make (a horse) lively’
Read More‘mauvais coucheur’: meaning and origin
a difficult, uncooperative or unsociable person—UK, 1829—from French ‘mauvais coucheur’, literally ‘bad bedfellow’, with original allusion to a person whom a traveller had to share a bed with when stopping over at an inn
Read More‘to be all fingers and thumbs’: meaning and origin
also ‘to be all thumbs’—to be extremely clumsy (i.e., lacking in manual dexterity)—19th century—variants of the original phrase ‘each finger is a thumb’, already proverbial in the mid-16th century
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word histories 