The Cat, the Bee, and the Dog

Two hundred and fifty years after Dr Johnson wrote his celebrated dictionary with the aid of just six helpers, the BBC and the Oxford English Dictionary have teamed up to help solve some intriguing word mysteries.

The O.E.D. is trying to find the earliest verifiable usage of every single word in the English language. There are currently 600,000 words in the O.E.D. and counting. That's where the BBC TV series Balderdash and Piffle comes in. They are asking for the public's help in tracking down the origins of 50 words - the OED-BBC Wordhunt. My guess is that any member of their audience could master my grammar class with one hand tied behind his or her back.

Among the words and phrases are flip-flop (verifiable evidence before 1970), wolf-whistle (verifiable evidence before 1952 and information on the word's origin), and shaggy dog story (verifiable evidence before 1946 and information on the phrase's origin).

My favorite was their call for help with the phrase “dog's bollocks.” The cat's whiskers and the bee's knees have both referred to “the very best, the acme of excellence” since 1923, but the coarser phrase, dog's bollocks, doesn't appear until more modern times. The editors were hoping someone could find a reference to the term and its variants before 1989. And someone did. Here's the phrase's new entry on O.E.D. website:

dog's bollocks n. (also dog's ballocks) Brit. coarse slang (a) Typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs (see quot. 1949) (rare) (b) (with the) the very best, the acme of excellence; cf. the cat's whiskers at cat n.1 131, bee's knees n. (b) at bee n.1 5b.

1949 E. PARTRIDGE Dict. Slang. (ed. 3) 1033/2 Dog's ballocks, the typographical colon-dash (:-).

1989 C. DONALD et al. (title) Viz: the dog's bollocks: the best of issues 26 to 31. 1995 Times 4 Oct. 7/1 Before Tony Blair's speech, a chap near me growled: ‘'E thinks 'e's the dog's bollocks.’ Well he's entitled to. It was a commanding speech: a real dog's bollocks of an oration. 2000 Front Oct. 51/3 You said you quite fancied Jon Bon Jovi. Yeah, Jon Bon Jovi is the dog's bollocks.

Note that if you add a right-hand parenthesis to a dog's bollocks, it becomes an ASCII smiley face.