making it across the pond?

[Michael Quinion]

Jonathan Lighter wrote about "dog's breakfast":

> I've seen it in recent U.S usage, but I think it's still a novelty
> here, confined to high-toned journalists looking for "new"
> expressions.

Sorry to be late with comments, but I've only just got back - and
recovered - from a brief holiday in a baking hot Bruges.

I would have agreed that this is certainly a British expression,
though the purported origin from the Phrase Finder sounds suspicious,
since there's the related "dog's dinner" and even "pig's breakfast".
These support my own assumption that the allusion is more to the kind
of miscellaneous mixed-up food items that you might get in a dog's
bowl than to vomit.

Newspaperarchive.com has a number of US citations going back to 1948,
which imply that it has had a comparatively long-term and continuing
circulation in the US without its ever becoming widely known. Two of
them have the extended form "about as mixed up as a dog's breakfast",
which may confirm my impression of the origin of the term. That form
doesn't appear much, if at all, in British English; it may indicate
American writers felt they needed to make its origin clearer to their
readers, or at least record what they thought the origin was.

--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: <wordseditor at worldwidewords.org>
Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>