notes on the origin of ‘mad money’
USA, 1922—flappers’ slang: the sum of money that a flapper carried as a precaution so as not to be left financially helpless in case she and her boyfriend got ‘mad’ at each other while on a date
Read MoreTag: New Zealand
‘to be a box of birds’: meaning and origin
Australia and New Zealand, 1939—to be in good spirits, ‘chirpy’—the image is of a boxful of chirping birds (cf. the extended form ‘happy as a bird in a box of birdseed’)—New-Zealand variant ‘to be a box of fluffy ducks’, also ‘to be a box of fluffies’
Read More‘bush telegraph’: meanings and origin
Australia, 1863—originally referred to any chain of communications by which bushrangers were warned of police movements—soon extended to any rapid informal network by which information, rumour, gossip, etc., is spread
Read More‘rugby, racing and beer’: meaning and origin
the 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 Morethe anti-nuclear phrase ‘one flash and you’re ash’
Australia, 1953—slogan used by opponents of nuclear weapons—also used in New Zealand
Read Moreorigin of ‘first past the post’ (as applied to a voting system)
Australia and New Zealand 1913—alludes to horse racing, in which a horse wins a race by being the first to pass the finishing post
Read Morethe jocular origin of ‘happy as Larry’
from 1857 onwards in Australian newspapers, but apparently of Irish-English origin—the forename ‘Larry’ was probably chosen as a jocular reinforcement, a variant reduplication, of the adjective ‘happy’
Read Morefrom the trenches of WWI: ‘cootie’ (‘body louse’)
from army use on the Western Front during World War One: ‘cootie’, ‘body louse’, ‘cooty’, ‘infested with lice’, ‘coot’, ‘louse’, probably ultimately refer to the aquatic bird called ‘coot’, reputed to be lice-infested
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘something nasty in the woodshed’
UK, 1930s—from Cold Comfort Farm (1932), by Stella Gibbons, in which a character exploits a traumatic childhood experience to exert control over her family
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word histories 