‘(as) old as the hills’: meaning and early occurrences
exceedingly or immeasurably old—Britain, 1762—perhaps alludes to the fact that a hill is a permanent feature of a particular landscape
Read MoreTag: Scotland
‘like a cock at a gooseberry’: meaning and origin
very quickly and without hesitation; eagerly—Scotland and northern England, 1778
Read More‘mountain dew’: meanings and origin
Britain, 1747: dew of the kind that settles on mountains—Scotland, 1816: whisky or other spirit, especially when home-made or illicit (originally in reference to whisky distilled in the Highlands, i.e., in the mountainous region of Scotland)
Read More‘Nessie’: meaning and origin
January 1934, in the Daily Record and Mail (Glasgow, Scotland)—composed of ‘Ness’ in ‘Loch Ness’ and the suffix ‘-ie’, used to form pet names
Read Morenineteenth-century deriding of the Loch Ness monster
Scotland—1852: illustrates how people will react when spotting unidentified creatures in Loch Ness—1892: mocks the many alleged sightings of the sea-serpent at that time
Read More‘the clean potato’: meaning and origin
the very, the real, or the proper person or thing—1830—of Scottish or Irish origin—perhaps an extended form of the synonymous phrase ‘the potato’
Read More‘pan-loafy’: meaning and origin
Scotland, 1941—of a person, manner of speaking, etc.: affectedly refined or cultivated, pretentious—from the fact that a pan-loaf (i.e., a loaf baked in a pan or tin, having a hard, smooth crust), being more expensive than a plain loaf, was considered a sign of affluence
Read More‘to come a gutser’: meanings and origin
Australian soldiers’ slang, 1917—literally: to fall heavily; figuratively: to suffer a failure or defeat—‘gutser’ (Scotland, 1901): originally denoted a belly flop—derived from ‘gut’ in the sense of the belly
Read More‘bone idle’: meaning and origin
Scotland, 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’
Read More‘to make a spoon or spoil a horn’: meaning and origin
Scotland, 1806—to make a determined effort to achieve something, whether ending in success or failure—refers to the making of spoons out of the horns of cattle or sheep, which was common in Scotland till late in the 19th century
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