Meaning
A jokey retort telling someone that you do not believe a word of what they have just said: the claim is so absurd it must be a wind-up. It elaborates the older 'pulling someone's leg', meaning to tease or try to deceive someone. Very informal and chiefly British and Australian. Very informal, good-humoured register; instantly marks a speaker as British or Australian. Regional use: British English.
Origin
The phrase grew out of 'you're pulling my leg', the established expression for fooling someone: since one leg has already been pulled, the speaker mockingly offers the other one instead. Dating is uncertain; Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Catch Phrases records Frank Shaw's attribution of the expression to the 1920s. The stock explanation for the bells is Partridge's conjecture that the other leg is imagined dressed like a court jester in cap and bells, 'presumably from pictures of court jesters'; reference sources present this as speculation rather than documented history, and Wiktionary treats the bells simply as a comic embellishment of 'pull the other one'. No verified point of invention is known.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- Go and pull the other one
- Pull the other leg, it's got bells on
- Pull the other one
- Pull the other one, it's got brass bells on
Usage Examples
- You met the prime minister on a night bus? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
- When Dan claimed he had finished the report weeks ago, Marta laughed and told him to pull the other one.
- The seller said the car was practically new - pull the other one, it's got bells on, because the odometer reads 300,000.