Word has been around a while. It’s more-or-less clipped from you have my word on that and it means, “that’s the truth,” or “I’m telling you the Straight Dope®” Word up was a little more emphatic.
MS Word® is a horse of a different color, though, fer shizzle.
I have spent enough time nammyjackin’ around in this thread for tonight.
>“Christopher Reeve” meaning alcoholic drink. I assume it’s a rhyming slang like Brittneys or Collies, but I cant think what it may relate to. Any ideas me old chinas?
Makes you paralytic?
The brass monkey one is fairly well known. As The Word Detective puts it:
" “brass monkeys” is actually a shortening of the phrase “cold enough to freeze the tail off a brass monkey”. … such knickknacks were, in fact, quite popular in Victorian drawing rooms, usually found in sets of three, set in the classic kitsch “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” pose. Given that brass monkeys were the Lava Lamps of the age and thus never far from the Victorian mind, their use in the phrase is not surprising "
http://www.word-detective.com/back-r.html#monkeys
To that I’d add that obviously the phrase was usually about their balls, not tails. And any bloke knows what happens to his balls when it gets really cold; by extension if it was really cold even the brass monkeys would suffer the same fate.
I recently heard in a BBC documentary titled “Taking the Piss Out of London,” which is a interesting account of the various practical and industrial uses of urine, that the expression is believed by some to be related to the alum-production industry which lasted from the early 17th century well into the 19th.
First, the expression has only been used with a subject and object relatively recently. The original usage (still common) was just “You’re taking the piss,” roughly analagous to “You’re pulling my leg.”
Supposedly, this is because there was a lot of money to be made shipping the collected household wee (which was put out in barrels like nightsoil) up the coast from London to the shale quarries of Yorkshire, where it was used in the last stages of the process of alum production. (Alum was vital as a mordant for fabric dyes.)
Anyway, being in the trade of moving pee was one way to become a person of, um, substance, but not something readily admitted to in society. Therefore, the people engaged in this business would claim to be in something more genteel-- commonly meeting inquiries with the stock reply, “I carry wine.” Eventually, people became wise, though, and would reply, “Ah, you’re taking the piss!”
Of course, this whiffs a bit of pop etymology, but it’s interesting nonetheless, and at least holds up to scrutiny better than the old “brass monkey” story, although that’s not saying much.