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Tag: radio

‘as Australian as meat pie’: meaning and origin

4th Jan 2021.Reading time 7 minutes.

Australia, 1966—typically Australian in character—alteration of the phrase ‘as American as apple pie’, with reference to the prominence of meat pie in Australian diet

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‘the Volvo set’: meaning and early occurrences

8th Nov 2020.Reading time 16 minutes.

USA, 1976—Australia, 1982—trendy middle- to upper-middle-class people, who are often conservationists, and who, in some cases, have moved from cities and urban areas into country areas

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‘to do a Melba’ | ‘to do a Dame Nellie’: meanings and origin

24th Sep 2020.Reading time 6 minutes.

Australia, 1946—to return to one’s profession after retirement; of a singer or other performer: to make frequent comebacks—from the repeated farewell performances given by Australian opera singer Dame Nellie Melba

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origin of ‘I’ve got the time if you’ve got the inclination’

7th Aug 2020.Reading time 8 minutes.

Seems to have originated in a joke, first recorded in 1955, in which the Tower of London says to the Leaning Tower of Pisa: “I’ve got the time and you’ve got the inclination.”

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‘Miss Otis regrets’: a recurring phrase

8th Jul 2020.Reading time 17 minutes.

UK 1934 – USA 1935—alludes to a sardonic song by Cole Porter, about the lynching of an upper-class woman after she murders her unfaithful lover

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a Scots phrase: ‘who stole your scone?’

6th Jul 2020.Reading time 6 minutes.

1928—addressed to someone who looks glum—‘scone’ (originally Scots, early 16th century) denotes a light plain doughy cake

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‘beer today (and) gone tomorrow’: early occurrences

20th May 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

USA, 1931—jocular variant (coined on separate occasions by various persons, independently from one another) of ‘here today (and) gone tomorrow’

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‘not waving but drowning’: meaning and origin

17th Mar 2020.Reading time 12 minutes.

used of a person whose display of distress misleads others into underestimating this distress—UK, 1962—from ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ (1954), by Stevie Smith

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notes on ‘all fur coats and no knickers’

12th Mar 2020.Reading time 12 minutes.

UK, 1963—ostentatious vulgarity in social life—from the literal sense of a fashionably dressed woman whose appearance covers vulgarity

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meaning and origin of ‘up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire’

12th Jan 2020.Reading time 19 minutes.

‘upstairs to bed’—UK, 1923: title of a song by Nixon Grey—‘Bedfordshire’ jocular extension of ‘bed’ (1665)—‘the wooden hill’ metaphor for ‘the stairs’ (1856)

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