Phraseology and Culture in English

ett, 1951), and busy as a bill-poster in a high wind (Frank Hardy, The Out-
casts of Foolgarah, 1971). These seem to be variations of an earlier British 
simile (Grose 1811) busy as the devil in a high wind. Meanwhile busy as a
one-armed milker on a dairy farm is on record (Northern Territory News,
January 1983) as a more recent invention based on the Australian variant of 
the underlying pattern. All are rather far-fetched ways of depicting busyness, 
and show the hyperbole that is typical of many extended similes (see fur-
ther below, Section 5). A down-to-earth addition to the set is busy as a
blowie (‘blowfly’) at a barbie (‘barbecue’), captured in a Google search of 
Australian internet documents, which casts a more negative judgement on 
frenetic energy, as characteristic of that despised insect. Being too busy at 

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Pam Peters 
one’s work can put you out of step with your working mates,
13
in a country 
where solidarity is valued.
With solidarity goes social conformity, and anyone a little different may 
attract suggestions of insanity. Madness is imputed rather readily, via Aus-
tralian animal images such as barmy as a bandicoot; mad as a cut snake / a
gumtree full of galahs, and (having) kangaroos loose in the top paddock.
This last one owes something to the British idiom bats in the belfry as well 
as a tile loose. In nineteenth century Australian English, the latter was rel-
exified as a shingle loose or a shingle short, in terms of the wooden shin-
gles used then as roofing material. The second formulation has provided the 
pattern for numerous twentieth century suburban examples embodying the 
word short and embellishing the concept:
a chop short of a barbecue
a few sandwiches short of a picnic
a few bricks short of a load
a few beans short of a bag
a paling short of a fence
a few flagstones short of a patio
a few shelves short of a display cabinet (from Wilkes 1995) 
These variations on a single theme represent one of the most productive 
formal idioms in current Australian English, and oblique ways of indicat-
ing dementia or insanity (real or imputed). The quasi-arithmetic keeps it at 
arm’s length, and alternatives listed by Chapman (1989) and Partridge 
(1984) show that the topic is similarly tabooed elsewhere in the English-
speaking world. The need for such paraphrases is all the greater for Aus-
tralians since more direct idioms such as mad as a cut snake* (also mad as
a meat axe*) are increasingly applied to fierce anger, blurring the line 
between passion and madness (Peters 2004: 335). Many of the examples 
returned from Australian internet documents (Google 2004) show this 
ambiguity. Though this use of “mad” to mean ‘angry’ is sometimes thought 
of as the “American” sense, the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) reports 
it being widely used in British dialects, so it may well have reached
Australia in the nineteenth century. Apart from the use of paraphrases 
expressing madness (‘insanity’), Australian idiom plays it down in similes 
such as silly as a wheel* or silly as a two-bob watch*, using dry mechani-
cal images to limit the emotional impact of referring to mental distur-
bance.

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Similes and other evaluative idioms in Australian English
247
Yet dysfunctional and ineffectual behavior are the focus of some of the 
most elaborate evaluative idioms in Australian English. These are the infi-
nitely variable statements prefaced with couldn’t, a pattern set by British 
examples such as couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding. Australian 
examples seem to begin with couldn’t lead a flock of homing pigeons (Fred 
Daly, From Curtin to Kerr, 1977), and thereafter there is a flood of them, 
including couldn’t train a choko vine over a country dunny mentioned 
above (p. 227). Others among those reported by Wilkes (1995) are: 
couldn’t blow the froth off a glass of beer
couldn’t find a grand piano in a one-roomed house
couldn’t get a kick in a stampede
couldn’t pick a seat at the pictures
couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag
couldn’t go two rounds with a revolving door
These highly idiosyncratic statements consist of a single syntactic pattern: 
initial couldn’t followed by a transitive verb, its object, and an adverbial 
adjunct. Though the idiom is lexically open, each example is put to the same 
semantic and pragmatic purpose, i.e. to provide a judgement on someone’s 
competence, by depicting their inability to execute a simple task. The tasks 
vary from excessively humdrum to the far-fetched, but all serve to convey 
the negative evaluation. 
A not dissimilar frontier of evaluation can be found in the lexically open 
set of similes prefaced with useful, and also useless. These are used to judge 
ideas as well as the value of people’s contributions to an enterprise, as in as
useful as a pocket in a singlet, i.e. undergarment (Sam Weller, Bastards I
Have Met, 1976). Other far-fetched similes for uselessness refer to a glass
door on a dunny (National Times, January 1981), and to an ashtray on a
motorbike (Sydney Morning Herald, February 1984). These too form an 
idiomatic set with a regular grammatical pattern, where useful / useless
precedes a noun with indefinite article in front and a prepositional phrase 
behind. The negative evaluation is explicit in useless, but rests on the ri-
diculousness of the whole phrase when it begins with useful. As with the 
phrases led by couldn’t, the improbable is used to describe the incompetent. 
Australian idiom also offers periphrastic ways of saying that someone 
comes off worst, or in colloquial terms is “done for”. Done like a dinner* is a 
well-attested simile in both nineteenth and twentieth century sources. Ref-
erences to food also figure in all over the place like a madwoman’s custard

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Pam Peters 
(or lunchbox), a simile used to refer to a battered human body (D’Arcy 
Niland, Call me when the Cross turns over, 1957). It puts a grim spin on 
the simile all over the place like a madwoman’s knitting / washing (T. 
Hungerford, Riverslake, 1953), which simply refers to a state of disarray, 
like the proverbial dog’s breakfast / dinner. References to a knockout blow 
(which puts someone “out cold”) can also be couched in elaborate para-
phrase, as in cold as a polar bear’s backside / bum (Lawson Glassop, We
were the Rats, 1944). Death itself is underscored in the simile dead as a
maggot* which first appears in Australia after World War II, no doubt with 
soldiers returning from tropical combat zones, and nightmarish experience 
of nature’s way of dealing with corpses. Linguistically speaking it works 
by metonymy, yet it is among the plainest of the various Australian similes 
we have reviewed, confronting death without euphemism. 
Death may be the one human theme which restrains the otherwise lively 
construction of lexical idioms and similes in Australia. Almost all the other 
themes discussed seem to embody word play at least, and far-flung rhetori-
cal conceits at the other end of the scale. The scripting of Australian socio-
cultural experience bears further analysis in rhetorical terms.