The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #95824 Message #1869483
Posted By: autolycus
26-Oct-06 - 06:53 PM
Thread Name: BS: Who are 'The Dickens'?
Subject: RE: BS: Who are 'The Dickens'?
'Sick as a parrot' cos parrots prone to psittacosis.
The phrases 'sick as a parrot ' and 'over the moon' became current around 1978, and there had been a psitt...... outbreak in about 1973 in West Africa.
The 'over the moon' bit might ultimately derive from the 'Hey diddle diddle' nursery rhyme.
See further in , for example, Nigel Rees' Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins. Many such books have (suggested) origins for any number of phrases.