Doug said:
Where does "Cut the cheese" come from ? It must be hard to learn American as a foreigner !
Couldn't find it...but I found this...
Cut the Mustard
The
OED2 has it deriving from the slang sense of
mustard meaning the best (flavorful, what makes something else taste good). O.Henry uses the word in the 1904
Cabbages and Kings in this fashion. The phrase
cut the mustard comes from about the same period, first appearing in print a year earlier. The
cut refers to harvesting the plant. If you can't cut the mustard, you can't supply what is best.
....now I think I know what "cut the cheese" means and I do not think it is missing from the list just because of its gross meaning because right next to the above I found this(and pardon me for posting it, it's a word I never say and only posted here to prove my point)...
Cunt
This word for the female genitalia dates back to the Middle English period, c.1325. (Although researchers have found a London street named
Gropecuntelane from c. 1230.) Although the word cannot be traced back further than this, there are cognates in a variety of other Germanic languages, indicating a Germanic origin.
Cunt does not come from the Latin
cunnus, which is also a term for the female pudenda, although a common root back in the mists of time cannot be discounted. Use of the word as term of abuse for a woman is a 20th century sense, dating to 1929
