Rogue trader

(n) A little known offshoot of the slave trade was the practice of selling prisoners. When British jails became overcrowded in the 17th century, a warden would furtively contact a merchant willing to buy prisoners, known as a “rogue trader”. This practice proved a valuable source of income for the prison authorities and continued for some time after the slave trade had been abolished.

Rogue traders would purchase inmates from debtors prisons, village jails and long-term facilities, usually poor souls without families or those serving severe sentences with little hope of being released, and ship them to the colonies for hard, manual labouring tasks: mining, railway building, prostitution. Rogue traders were cruel, unsentimental men who thought of prisoners as little more than animals. Conditions on the ships were brutal and punishment for anyone trying to escape or disobeying orders could be sadistic. One man was reportedly hung on a meat hook and taught to play the accordion for an entire round-the-world voyage. Rogue traders were therefore feared, despised and vilified throughout society and it was only natural that the phrase should later be adapted to mean someone in the financial sector with a terrible taste in shirts.

Basket case

(n) A fine leather case for carrying a basket. Never caught on, because it could cost five times the value of the object it was holding. It was, therefore, considered a stupid invention and the phrase was adopted to refer to an insane person.

See also: chocolate frying-pan, paper life-saver, soya milk

Humpty dumpty

The rhyme of humpty-dumpty is commonly supposed to have started as a riddle: "Which object tumbles off a wall and, having fallen, thwarts the best efforts of even the bravest souls to restore it?"

But is "egg" necessarily the answer? The clues in the rhyme are actually rather vague. An egg isn’t the first thing that springs to mind in this situation. Leaving an egg casually upon a wall is unusual, unless the work of a distracted cuckoo. And were one’s mislaid egg to tumble off said wall, you’d hardly ask a passing troupe of soldiers on horseback to have a go at restoring it to its former state, would you? Hooves and swords all over the place. The misfortunate egg could as easily be a watermelon, a Ming vase or a balloon full of giblets, any of which would tax the household cavalry’s engineering skills, and have just as much chance of being on a wall to begin with.

Humpty's depiction as an anthropomorphised egg in the Tenniel illustrations to Alice In Wonderland fixed the image which has endured ever since. But let us consider some of the alternative possibilities for the identity of this mystery object.

In Scotland, “lumpty-numpty” is a drunken idiot who keeps hitting his head. In parts of Cornwall, “crumpety-bumpety” is either a randy baker or a clumsy barmaid. There have been suggestions that humpty-dumpty was once a dialect term for: a dandelion clock, a toadstool, a snail or a wasp’s nest, all more natural wall-dwellers.

Humpty-dumpty has also been used to describe someone who fouls themselves during sex. But let's not go there.

Foot-stool

verb To tread in ordure: “I came out of my house, footstooled, and spent the rest of the walk to the grocery store dragging my right foot along the sidewalk in an effort to dislodge dog crap.” (Mark Twain)

Mine of information

1. A corruption of “Meinhoff information”.

During the Second World War a double agent known to British intelligence as Fritz Meinhoff became an increasingly useful source. He was thought to have been a young German civil servant who, alarmed when Hitler came to power, determined to undermine the Third Reich from the inside.

Ostensibly an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party, he rose through the ranks of its central command to the equivalent role to a British political party’s junior whip. He had access to policy decisions, military planning and the ear of the Führer. He also spoke impeccable English, and may even have been briefly educated in Engalnd, so decided early in the war that he would be valuable as a spy. With the blessing of the Party, he managed to secure a post at the British consulate in Alexandria as an interpreter. Once inside the building he quickly confided his mission and started to feed disinformation back to Berlin and reliable information to the allies via regular coded broadcasts. General Mountbatten admitted after the war that much of his strategic planning during the African campaign came from information gleaned from this source.

During one broadcast the name Fritz Meinhoff was used as a sign-off. “Meinhoff information” quickly spread throughout the intelligence services as an expression to denote trustworthy tip-offs. Sometime around VE day (May 7, 1945), Meinhoff broadcast a message which revealed his origins as a Nazi turncoat, but neither his real identity nor his location. Subsequent researchers into the story believed his real name was Max Müller, the son of a German dairy magnate, a party member listed as having been posted from Berlin but never returned. Former employees of the British consulate in Alexandria identified Fritz Meinhoff from descriptions of Müller. They said that the man they knew as Meinhoff had left the Consulate on the evening of May 15th, 1945 “to celebrate” and was never seen again.

2. What landfill will eventually become.

The funny farm

Commonly used as a light-hearted alternative to asylum or “mental hospital”, the term has also been used in other spheres.

In entertainment it was used informally to describe a school for clowns founded by Giuseppe Gomito in Victorian London.

In agriculture, it referred to vast sheds used in the production of fungi. Darkened “funny farms” sprang up throughout the USA in the 1940s to cater for the explosion in demand for mushrooms for use in Campbell’s condensed cream-of-mushroom soup.

It is also likely to be a corruption of the earlier English slang term “fanny farm” (brothel).

Bus pass

In the UK the Bus Pass is a pre-paid - or to pensioners, free – ticket allowing one to travel on any bus in a given area. In the US, however, the phrase is a verb as in “I was bus-passed three times today”, meaning “a bus failed to stop for me”. 

It came into common use during civil rights protests of the 1950s, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when the right of black passengers to sit anywhere on a bus became a national issue. Bus-passing was a common complaint among black residents of southern towns in the ‘50s and ‘60s. 

The expression has more or less died out now, thankfully, but is sometimes used to describe the situation where a driver fails to see a passenger at a stop, for example:  “A number 6 came along but I wanted the 2 or the 19, and both of them drew up to the stop but didn’t see me, as the 6 was obscuring me. I was bus-passed like a motherf***er.” (Denis Hopper)