Meaning
Chiefly British and Australian: a person, usually a young man, who is the favourite of someone in authority and can do no wrong in their eyes, a comment often made with resentment by everyone else. The matching form for a woman is blue-eyed girl. The American counterpart is 'fair-haired boy'; it typically follows 'someone's' or 'the'. Informal and usually sour-toned; it is spoken more by the envious than by the favoured. Regional use: British English (also Australian); US equivalent is fair-haired boy.
Origin
A 20th-century colloquialism. Partridge's Dictionary of Slang dates it to about 1914, established in standard English by 1930, and explains the allusion as innocence, on the model of the American 'white-haired boy' for a mother's favourite. Its best-known early appearance is P. G. Wodehouse's A Damsel in Distress (1919): 'He's the blue-eyed boy, and everyone else is an also-ran.' No older literal source is documented - the image is simply the favoured, clear-eyed child - and the phrase has stayed roughly at the informal register of those first uses.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- blue-eyed girl
- someone's blue-eyed boy
- the blue-eyed boy
- the blue-eyed boy of the party
Usage Examples
- Whatever the blue-eyed boy wants, the blue-eyed boy gets, sighed the other analysts.
- She was the director's blue-eyed girl, credited with work her colleagues had done.
- Once the minister's blue-eyed boy, he was quietly dropped after the election.