BIG GIRL’S BLOUSE

[Q] From Colin Alexander, New Zealand: Big girl’s blouse. How did this extraordinary pejorative come about? It is usually applied to males and seems to mean a milquetoast, but how?

[A] For those in other parts of the English-speaking world who have never heard of this astonishing idiom, let me explain that it is heard now quite widely in Britain (and elsewhere, too, it seems), though it originated in the North of England.

I’ve been vaguely dreading somebody asking this question, because it is one of a set of Northern idioms that are quite impenetrable in their origins. Others are the exclamation of surprise, “well, I’ll go to the foot of our stairs!” and the dismissive “all mouth and trousers”.

People do indeed use it to mean an ineffectual or effeminate male, a weakling, though it is often used in a bantering or teasing way rather than as an out-and-out insult (“You can’t drink Coke in a pub, you big girl’s blouse!”; “Blokes who don’t take on dares are big girl’s blouses”). The American milquetoast isn’t quite equivalent (since it has a greater emphasis on meekness rather than on an unmanly nature), but it’s close.

It seems to have been first noticed in the 1960s. The first example in print we know of is from 1969, in a script of the British ITV network sitcom Nearest and Dearest (which ran from 1969 to 1972). This starred Jimmy Jewel as Eli Pledge and Hylda Baker as his spinster sister Nellie, who inherit a pickle-bottling factory in Colne, Lancashire. It was rough-and-ready northern humour, of the type conventionalised as gritty, and full of innuendo (plus malapropisms from Nellie).

It has been suggested that Hylda Baker invented the phrase in her stage act. If she didn’t, where big girl’s blouse came from is likely to remain a mystery. Coincidentally, Brian Edmondson e-mailed me to comment that his Liverpudlian father, who died in 1979, always said “he’s flapping like a big girl’s blouse”. This conjures up an image of ineffectualness that is plausible as a extended idea from which the current version could have derived.

Other than that, your guess is as good as mine ...

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