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 MoreAustralia, 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 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
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Australia, 1953—slogan used by opponents of nuclear weapons—also used in New Zealand
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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
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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’
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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
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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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