Meaning
Completely worthless, trivial or beneath serious attention; fit only to be dismissed. An informal American put-down applied to things, ideas and claims, most often in the predicate and stronger in its intensified form; it has never been widely adopted outside the United States. Informal and dismissive; mildly contemptuous of the thing rather than the person. Regional use: American English.
Origin
United States Army slang of the Second World War. The wordhistories blog's earliest print example is a soldier's glossary in the St. Louis Star-Times of 10 November 1941, where it meant unpleasant news; the earliest example in the modern worthless sense is from the Corvallis Gazette-Times of 9 February 1943, and the shortened form appears in the Miami Herald of 28 April 1944. The Phrase Finder independently traces the phrase to WWII army slang and cites the Lowell Sun of October 1944. The derivation is debated: a 1945 article on GI lingo in the journal American Speech listed it as a cleaned-up version of a cruder vulgar expression, while Morris Finder, also in American Speech (1957), recorded soldiers' own explanation that it alludes to birds pecking seed from horse and cattle droppings, farmyard material only a bird would want.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- strictly for the birds
- that's for the birds
Usage Examples
- The critics called the sequel strictly for the birds, but audiences queued around the block.
- A fifty-page contract just to activate a phone plan? That's for the birds.
- He dismissed the tabloid story as for the birds and went back to his coffee.