Phraseology and Culture in English

breakfast, which is variously defined in terms of a combination of ‘a 
yawn’, ‘a stretch’, ‘a hitch in the belt’, ‘a piss’, but always ‘a good look 
around’ (Wilkes 1995). The more suburban version is equally earthy: a
shave, a shit and a good look around. Against such prevalent misfortune, 
those who strike it lucky and fail to share it are likely to be resented (lousy
as a bandicoot) – especially if they make a show of their new resources, 
hence the deprecating comment on someone flash as a rat with a gold
tooth*. Expensive dress and being overdressed for the occasion are also 
deprecated in dressed like a pox-doctor’s clerk (Wilkes 1995). The same 
level of overdress is noted in dressed up like a Christmas tree (ACE G08: 
1501). There is however no merit in being rough as bags*, also rough as
guts*, and rough as buggery (ACE R10: 2108). Roughness per se has no 
mitigating value (cf. rough diamond), and is censured against a notion of 
civilized behavior.
In times of trouble, alcohol is perhaps the most universal solace – though 
its consumption in Australia has not exactly declined in times of plenty
10
.
At any rate there is a continuous stream of similes for intoxication, stretch-
ing from the nineteenth century drunk as Chloe, which may well be based 
on antecedents from Britain and / or America. Baker (1978: 239) notes the 
“English phrase ‘drunk as Floey’”, as does Partridge (1984), while accord-
ing to Chapman (1989), flooey itself is American slang for ‘drunk’.
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Drunk
as Chloe was first recorded in 1832, in Jon Bee’s Slang Dictionary, and 

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Similes and other evaluative idioms in Australian English
245
therefore too early to be a reference to much-visited Lefebvre painting ti-
tled “Chloe”, which was hung in the Young and Jackson’s hotel in Mel-
bourne in 1875. So it seems that the painter was responding to a simile 
which was already current. References to drunkenness are often allusive, as 
in drunk as an owl (perhaps a short-circuit of the American drunk as a
boiled owl (Chapman 1989)), and in the similes based on full, all of which 
exploit its colloquial Australian sense (‘drunk’) to provide a play on the 
standard sense of the word. The most elaborate example is full as a State
school*, a not-very-serious comment on overcrowding in the classroom, but 
possibly rhyming slang for ‘fool’. Compare drunk / full as a pissant
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, i.e. 
‘fool’ (Patrick White, Riders in the Chariot, 1961). Other Australian simi-
les for drunkenness may also be paraphrases of those found in other varie-
ties of English. The American drunk as a coot (a proverbially foolish bird) 
becomes full as a goog* (‘egg’) or full as a boot*, both providing a pun on 
the word full for Australians. It works in the same way as the northern 
hemisphere equivalent: tight as a tick, with the pun on tight. The indirect-
ness of the numerous Australian references to intoxication suggest the com-
mon need for a code of silence, a sense that “people in glass houses 
shouldn’t throw stones”. 
Extreme forms of social behavior, when not associated with alcohol, are 
cheerfully depicted in other types of Australian simile. Some show the 
value put upon unusual resilience and bravado, not only the more front / 
hide than…examples mentioned in Section 3, but also the set that vary the 
theme of game as Ned Kelly, such as game as a pebble*, where pebble
stands in its now obsolete colloquial sense of ‘indomitable person / horse’; 
and game as a pissant*.
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Unusual busyness and frenetic activity are ex-
pressed not only through flat out like a lizard drinking, but also in the jokey 
simile busy as a one-armed bill-sticker in a gale (Dal Stivens, Jimmy Bock-