SHAGGY DOGS:TO BE stony broke means to be hard up, out of cash or near financial ruin. This expression was in regular use by 1886 and reminds of the darker side of the great Victorian empire when craftsmen and skilled workers, finding themselves in debt, would have their tools repossessed and their stone benches broken up if they failed to make repayments.
They also used to send such poor wretches to debtors' prison where they could be sentenced for up to two years, with repeat offenders being given hard labour (breaking rocks or stones). I wonder why they just didn't cut their hands off and make it impossible for them to work ever again to repay their debts.
Someone just walked over my graveis a remark often used when a person gets the shivers. This expression came about thanks to an old wives' tale, which is a legend, fable or story that is invariably both ridiculous and amazing and only ever believed by the naive and gullible. The "wives" in this instance believed that an involuntary shiver is felt when the place where a person will eventually be buried is being walked upon, and this was seen as a reminder of that person's mortality. The phrase, an old wives' tale, was made popular in 1595 when George Peel produced a play of the same name, featuring wicked witches and fanciful and outrageous events masquerading as factual. Mind you, there are some modern ex-wives' tales I could tell that would make your hair curl in disbelief.
To camp it upis to perform in an effeminate and flamboyant manner in an attempt to draw attention to oneself. Quite how this phrase became applied to overt homosexuality isn't known, but it is recorded that trails or groups of civilians would follow a marching army, providing various services such as sales of alcohol, washer women or male and female prostitutes. As they would also camp nearby, this could perhaps be from where the associated expression, camp as a row of tents, derives.
To be whiter than white is to be seen as pure, innocent and virtuous, never implicated in any wrongdoing. The phrase has been in use since the end of the 16th century, being lifted directly from Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis(1593), which includes the line: "Teaching the sheets a whiter hew than white". It was popularised and used widely throughout the English-speaking world as the result of an advertising campaign during the 1950s by the washing powder manufacturer Persil.
Extracted from Shaggy Dogs and Black Sheepby Albert Jack (Penguin Books)