ABSTRACT
O.B. See: same O.B. O.B.E. See: time for your. O be joyful. See: I’ll make you sing. O begga me! or O Bergami! is the way Ware presents these variants, but what he should, I think, have written was O Bergami! and its derivative oh, beggar me!, with beggar for bugger, naturally. Ware classifies it as ‘London people’s’— i.e., proletarian-and dates it at 1820; he adds: ‘Still used in the streets as intimating that the person addressed is a liar, or worse. From one Bergami-a lying witness at the trial of Queen Caroline-whose denial of everything brought about this phrase, with his eternal “non mi ricordo” [I don’t remember].’ At non me in his very valuable book, Ware notes that the non mi of the It. non mi ricordo became, c. 1820-30, the London proletariat’s synonym for a lie and was used thus: ‘That’s a non me for one’—‘That’s a lie, to start with’. O.K. See: okay; you’re O.K. oak. See: one that lives; within. oak chest. See: on second. oakum boy. See: ever since. oar. See: perched. oath. See: my bloody; my oath. object of the exercise. See: that is the o. oboe. See: play that. observed. See: hist! obsolete. See: if it works. obvious. See: for obvious reasons; glimpses. och man, you’re daft! ‘(followed by a laugh “like a tinkling bell, rippling up the scale”)—Molly Weir as Tattie MacKintosh in ITMA’ (VIBS). See also TOMMY HANDLEY. odd-come-shortlies. See: one of these o. odds. See: what’s the o. of all the dumb tricks! is described by Berrey as an ‘interjection of personal displeasure’: US: since c. 1920 and prob. earlier. The corresponding Brit, exclam. would be ‘Of all the bloody stupid things to do, that is the stupidest!’—which, however, doesn’t qualify as a c.p. A.B., 1978, notes that the US often substitutes stunts for tricks. off all the nerve!; what a nerve!; you’ve got a nerve!; your nerve!; I like your nerve!; also of all the gall! All were, orig., US; but, whereas the last has always been solely US, the others became, c. 1918, also Brit. As Americanisms, they are impossible to date with any accuracy; I’d hazard ‘since the 1890s’. J.W.C. notes, 1977, that of all the nerve is now ‘very rare in US’. off. See: come off; get them; got it off; I’ll let you; little less; my word, if you’re; and: off again, on again, Finnegan is a US c.p., deriving from an old song and has come to mean ‘intermittent’ or ‘capricious’ or ‘fickle’: late C19-20. But at first it was a ‘railroad expression as old as 1890 and referring to minor train wrecks: off the track and then back on the track. Finnegan has no significance, I believe, except that it makes a good rhyme’ (Fain, 1978). J.W.C., 1977, had remarked that it is ‘applied to someone dashing in and out. Common [c. 1911-16, if not earlier, but] now seldom heard’.
