ChrisB
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She was only the stable man’s daughter, but all the horsemen new ‘er.
Chickens**t - noun, adjective. Meaning - ‘Contemptible pettiness’
It appears no one really knows exactly when or where the term came into use, but several websites mention it's use in the military at some point during the 1950s as an alternate form of "bulls**t" and used in the same context....How far back these expressions and meanings go, I do not know. I suspect that bats**t only goes back to the mid-1960s and the tv show Batman...
Kids still do connect-the-dots in preschool and early elementary years in school.An expression I hear almost daily in this paranoid and conspiracy-obsessed time is "connect the dots." Yet I haven't seen a connect-the-dots puzzle in many years. Do you think most of the people who use the expression even know what it came from?
In recent years I've heard the "s" word used to connote something akin to "exceptionally favorable," as in "now there's the s***!"
The equivalent in the Era was to say that something is "the nuts." Or "the nertz" if you're a collegian in 1935.
"Nuts" as a reference to boy-bubbles goes back to the seventeenth century, so I suspect that was the implication of "it's the nuts." The most vital parts, the best bits, so to speak. The radio networks and the Breen Office understood it to mean that when they banned both that phrase and the "nertz" variation.
"The cat's nuts" is another version that was popular in the early 20th Century, later minced to "the cat's meow." My mother often refers to anything of excelling quality as "the cat's arse," which would seem to be another variation on the theme.
So how about "nuts" or "nutty" to mean insane, or at least irrational or ill-conceived?
...As for "tit," that wasn't considered lewd or vulgar in the circles in which I was raised -- in fact, the container with which babies were nursed was universally known, by adults and kids alike, as a "titty bottle."