I believe it was Peter O’Toole who was visiting Washington DC back before his career really took off and he went to a police officer to ask him, " Do you know where I can buy some fags?"
Hilarity ensued What I want to know:
I kinda know, but want more clarification: Bob’s Your Uncle/Fanny’s Your Aunt.
P. Brendon, in Eminent Edwardians, 1979, suggests an origin:
“When, in 1887, Balfour was unexpectedly promoted to the vital front
line post of Chief Secretary for Ireland by his uncle Robert, Lord
Salisbury (a stroke of nepotism that inspired the catch-phrase
‘Bob’s your uncle’), …”
You yanks have a lot of funnily named places/people. As well as Randy Bender linked to above you have an estate agent:
How about Chippy? I know you folks mean a Fish and Chips place, but if you casually announced you were going to a chippy after work to an american, they’d probably laugh at you. Or, if they’re religiously inclined, tell you you’re going to hell if you don’t repent your wanton ways.
Fair crack of the whip, cobbers, no Aussie-bashing!
Bob’s your uncle: it’s all taken care of (e.g. “All we have to do is take this down to the boozer and Bob’s your uncle, we’ll be rich!”)
Root… (Sex) (She was a great root, hey, wanna root): Or “I was rooting around in the drawer for some money”.
Smeg: electronic appliances.
Clacker: vagina (from cloaca).
Bunt: inject drugs.
Pull: pick up for sex (“Did you pull last night?”)
Skirt: a woman (“Charlie pulled a nice bit of skirt last night.”)
Bushpig: an unattractive woman.
I had no idea of the richness of the word “geezer.” I always thought it just meant an old guy. Since I’ve been feeling old, I thought it fit me. I don’t think of myself as disreputable, rather as a stand-up kind of guy. An old stand-up guy who happens to inhabit an arid place (which I hate as much as being old).
Who said old folks can’t learn new things (or was that old dogs can’t learn new tricks?)?
Though I know you’re American, and therefore realised that you’d chosen the name due to your age, I always difficulties thinking of you as anything other than “a bloke who lives in the desert”.
When Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Beautiful Game” was released in the US, they decided to replace the naughty British words with ones less offensive to the American CD buying public. So they replaced “crap” with “twat.”
I remember being a huge Red Dwarf fan when I was about 11 or 12, and using the word “smeg” in place of any other naughty words, because nobody else in the house knew what I was talking about. My older brother often admonished me to stop using “that stupid, made-up word,” and I would just smile at him beatifically.
For a while, I had some friends in the UK who, I swear, thought that I went out drinking a -lot-, because they’d hear me say (or, more specifically, see me type, as it was via IM) “-Man-, I was pissed the other night…blahblahblah”, and they’d take it that I was drunk, as opposed to the American meaning, that I was angry.
I agree wholeheartedly with the earlier-in-this-thread discussions of the richness of the word “bugger”. Wholly underused over here in the US, and should, without a doubt, be used more often. My favorite usage of it, however, has hands-down gotta be Foul Ole Ron in the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett. “Buggrit, buggrit, buggrem…”
Seriously though, lots of us yanks are big fans of the “BlackAdder” series and get alot of our English swear word knowledge from them. I particularly remember when Rowan Atkinson (as Ebinezer BlackAdder) said in the “BlackAdder Christmas Special” :
“Baldrick, I want you to buy me a turkey so large, that it looks like it’s mother had been rogered by an omnibus”