[General] Slang American Expressions

[aous02]

I'm learning American Slang expressions...Not having contact with natives I find some problems figuring out which ones are commonly used. Are these ones commonly used??

*Twenty-four seven : all the time
*Ace: To do something very well
*Flunk: to fail an exam or course of study
*Airhead: a stupid person; dumb
*All ears: Listening carefully
*An arm and a leg: A large amount of money
*Have Ants in your pants (hum): To be nervous or anxious or jumpy; to be unable to sit still.
*Average Joe: An ordinary person, especially a man.
*Bad egg:A troublemaker; someone who has a bad attitude and causes trouble
if anyone know any more expressions meaning the same as one of the above expressions and is more common than it that would be very helpeful.Thanks for all.

This is the 1st o many other posts to follow.

[Ouisch]

Yes, all the phrases you mentioned are quite common in AmE.

[RonBee]

Ouisch is a good egg.

[aous02]

Okay, good eggs.
I'll send my next list then.

[Charlie Bernstein]

But note that "airhead" is usually applied to women and is widely regarded as sexist.

[konungursvia]

I agree all are common; some can occur in British English too, as in "ace", which is after all a tennis serve that is so good no one could touch it. In Canada, "airhead" has no particular gender association that I have noticed, by the way, Charlie. :)

[Charlie Bernstein]

Originally Posted by konungursvia

I agree all are common; some can occur in British English too, as in "ace", which is after all a tennis serve that is so good no one could touch it. In Canada, "airhead" has no particular gender association that I have noticed, by the way, Charlie. :)

Great! Now I, too, can be an airhead!

[rimo83]

Ace...

I liked this topic so much, it's very useful & i can make benefit of it

[Searching for language]

Originally Posted by Charlie Bernstein

Great! Now I, too, can be an airhead!

You see, Canada is soooooooooo politically correct! No airheads on this site, though!

[curmudgeon]

Fuddy-duddy


Meaning

A stuffy or foolishly
old-fashioned person.

Origin

If any term sounds old and English, it must be this one. However, as so often, intuition is found to be wanting, as fuddy-duddy appears to be of American origin, possibly via Scotland, nor is it especially old. The first record that I can find of it is from the Texas newspaper The Galveston Daily News, 1889:

"Look here; I'm Smith - Hamilton Smith. I'm a minister and I try to do about right ... I object to
being represented as an old fuddy-duddy."

That usage - without any accompanying explanation - seems to suggest that the readership would have been expected to have been familiar with it. That is quite possible, there are several citations in American newspapers from the end of the 19th century that relate to a pair of fictional wags called Fuddy and Duddy. A string of their
rather weak gags was printed in the Boston Evening Transcript. Here's
an example from a November 1895 edition:

Fuddy: So Miss Dandervecken
is going to marry an Englishman. A lord, I suppose?
Duddy: Well, no, not exactly: but I understand that he's often as drunk as one.

Whether or not the expression
'fuddy-duddy' was already known and the names were taken from it, or whether it was the other way round, we can't now tell. The coincidence in the dates of the arrival of the two characters and the phrase does suggest that there was a connection of some kind.

Duddy was a Scottish term
meaning ragged - duds having been used to refer to rough tattered clothes since the 15th century. Fud, or fuddy, was a Scots dialect term for buttocks. In 1833, the Scots poet James Ballantyne wrote The Wee Raggit Laddie:

Wee stuffy, stumpy, dumpie
laddie,
Thou urchin elfin, bare an' duddy,
Thy plumpit kite an' cheek
sae ruddy
Are fairly baggit,
Although the breekums on thy fuddy
Are
e'en right raggit.

The full-on Scots dialect in that sentimental, Burns influenced rhyme is difficult to translate precisely. The gist of the meaning is:

Poor scruffy little lad, bare
and ragged, your wet belly and red cheeks are swollen and the trousers on your
buttocks are torn.

There is a British term -
'duddy fuddiel', which is also recorded from around the same date. William
Dickinson's A glossary of words and phrases pertaining to the dialect of
Cumberland, 1899, has:

"Duddy fuddiel, a ragged
fellow."

There may be a link between
'duddy fuddiel' and 'fuddy-duddy' but, as they don't mean exactly the same
thing, we can't be certain.

One thing we can be sure about; that the cartoon character Elmer Fudd inherited the name from the phrase. 'Fuddy-duddy' was in general circulation in the US well before the character was created in around 1940 and the expression accords with his old-fashioned and obsessive temperament.

In a rather sad sequel to the Boston Transcript's role in the coining of 'fuddy-duddy', Time magazine reported in 1939 that a survey commissioned by the paper found that, "the most frequent word used by advertisers to describe the paper was fuddy-duddy". The Transcript
ceased trading soon afterwards.