Box Deluxe
a spurious definition of the origin of the uk slang term the dog’s b-ll-ck’s, perpetrated probably in good faith by stephen fry on the bbc show qi.
the researchers for the show put into the mouth of the normally erudite and knowledgeable stephen fry the notion that early construction sets were labelled ‘box standard’ and ‘box deluxe’:
fry: in the early years of the 20th century, children’s construction sets, like meccano, were sold in two kinds, labelled “box standard” and “box deluxe”. and that, or so they say and persuade me, is where we get the two phrases “bog standard” and “dog’s b-ll-cks”!
these two ideas – one that ‘bog standard’ comes from ‘box standard’, which is plausible enough but, as we have seen, lacking any supporting evidence, and secondly, that ‘the dog’s b-ll-cks’ comes from ‘box deluxe’, which is pure invention. even if they could come up with such a box label, and that remains noticeably lacking, how is that linguistic jump supposed to have occurred, and why the long gap between the construction sets and the phrase being found in print?
fry did at least seem to have less than 100% faith in the story and qualified it with etymology’s most telling weasel words “or so they say…”.
dog’s b-ll-cks isn’t related in any way to box deluxe!
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