The mutt’s nuts

BBC2 is currently showing a programme called Balderdash and Piffle. The basic idea of the show is to look at expressions and try and find examples of usage before the earliest date stated in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). It sounds dull but it is actually very watchable.

Last night the programme looked at dog related expressions like “mucky pup” and shaggy dog story”. It also looked at the origin of the expression “Dog’s Bollocks”. For those not familiar with the term, Dog’s Bollocks means much the same as the cat’s whiskers or bee’s knees - the acme of excellence, so to speak

According to the OED the first hard evidence (i.e. used in print or song) of the expression was in 1989 when it appeared in the “comic” Viz. The programme did not come up with earlier had evidence of its usage but it did show that the expression had been used in a different meaning before 1989. Apparently it is printer’s slang for colon dash

:-

Being someone who laughs at fart jokes I won’t ever look at that combination of punctuation marks again without sniggering!

Or perhaps this is just a shaggy dog story....