SHAGGY DOG: SOMEONE WHO is Browned Offis not a happy person and is extremely fed up with a situation.
According to some research, this expression has its roots in the colourful London slang from between the two world wars. In those days, the slang word for a penny piece was a "brown", and if a person was annoying someone in any way, particularly on the street, they might be given a penny and simply told to go away.
The recipient of the coin had thus been "browned off", which gives the phrase we use today the suggestion of rejection that it has about it.
During the first half of the 20th century, small coins were pressed out of a hard-wearing nickel-brass alloy, which is how the term Brassed Offbecame used as an alternative to browned off. And this is where the word nickel, used in America for a coin of least value, also made out of a brass alloy, used to be the farthing.
This led to the expression "without even a brass farthing" being used to indicate poverty. In his book Naaman the Syrian, His Disease and Cure (1642), Daniel Rogers includes the line: "As bare and beggarly as if he had not one brasse farthing."
Meanwhile, two centuries later, Sir Walter Besant and James Rice used "I care not one brass farthing" in their novel The Seamy Side (1880).
To Sow Your Wild Oatsis a phrase applied to the pursuit of wild, possibly illegal and undoubtedly immoral practices while in the full bloom of youth.
The expression has been in use for more than four centuries, deriving from the notion that impulsive young men would scatter only wild and uncultured seed here, there and everywhere, while older men, being by now wiser and more experienced, would take care to sow their cultivated seed only on fertile ground.
Wild oats (or wild seed) produce weeds that are hard to get rid of and consequently cause many problems, but a man of experience has learned how to avoid all of that.
The expression passed over to wider use in 1829 with a line from William Cobbett: "The vices of youth are varnished over by the saying that there must be a time for the sowing of wild oats."
From this arose the loosely connected term Getting Your Oats, referring to indulgence in regular sexual activity for either sex.
But when we consider the actual meaning of the expression - "to be getting your share of the seed" - it rather loses its youthful, romantic sense, especially when applied to the fairer sex.
Personally, I think it is high time young people were banned from enjoying themselves and that the sowing of wild oats was left to the more mature, who really know how to have fun.
A Legend in Their Own Lifetimerefers to someone who has achieved a level of fame and respect and been recognised for it while they are alive, rather than posthumously.
This expression was first used by the author Lytton Strachey when he described Florence Nightingale in his book Eminent Victorians (1918).
• Extracted fromShaggy Dogs and Black Sheep by Albert Jack (Penguin Books)