"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 05/10/17(being fed up, brassed off)

Very often in English, we tend to focus on the colourful expressions so the words and phreses that really seems quite puzzling immediately and those seem to be the fun ones to delve into. But sometimes simplest, most everyday words, they kind of repay you if you look into them a little bit and I was just sitting in the car in a traffic jam the other day and I was wondering about being fed up. Why do we talk about being fed up with something? And it's similar to other expression in the RAF - that began in the RAF as indeed this one did as well - which is browned off, brassed off, cheesed off. Those all begun as an Army slang around the Second World War. But the expression actually goes back to the 18th century if you look all the way back to its beginnings and it was a metaphor. It was when the languid, lazy aristocracy were compared to farm animals that were force-fed to make them plump for market. It was in an English newspaper, the Middlesex Courier, and it recount a court case and it was argued that the Duke of Bourbone couldn't have hanged himself because he was unable either to stand on a chair or tie a knot. And the lawer said, "Everything is done for these princes. They neve learn to do anything. They are fed up, as it were, in a stall to exist and not to act. It is rare to find a princes who can walk decently across a room". Yes, it's all to do with leterally being fed up, particularly if you were a farm animal. But I mentioned a brassed off earlier and its beginnings in the RAF and that goes back probably to the idea of simply being ticked off by the top brass, so by a senior officer. So, no surprise there, but also in the Navy, it was connected to the really menian jod of polishing the brass work on board a ship and it happened to be done with a product called Brasso, so it's probably those two things combined that led to being brassed off entering the English language in a general sense. But, yeah, if you feeling fed up and brassed off, then you have my symphaties but at least you're not a farm animal.