Meaning
A scornful retort to an unbelievable story: you may tell that to the marines, for the sailors will not believe it. It dismisses a claim as a tall tale while joking that only a hopelessly gullible listener would swallow it, the marines having once been the Royal Navy's standing joke about green hands. Historically it mocked marine gullibility, though a First World War American recruiting poster gave it a patriotic spin, so the tone ranges from jeering to jocular. In Britain the marines are the Royal Marines, not the USMC. Regional use: General English (British origin, strong later American usage).
Origin
The joke is Royal Navy inter-service scorn: sailors treated marines as soldiers ignorant of seamanship, ready to believe anything - the first English marines were the Maritime Regiment of Foot raised in 1664. The earliest known record is the ex-sailor novelist John Davis's The Post-Captain (1804), with 'He may tell that to the marines, but the sailors will not believe him'; a short form appears in an 1846 preface, Byron had used a shortened version in 1823, and Hotten's slang dictionary of 1860 records it as the standard answer to a stiff yarn. The much older-sounding anecdote of Charles II in the 1660s directing Pepys to tell tales of flying fish to the marines first is a hoax: it was fabricated as a fake Pepys diary entry by the Royal Marines officer W. P. Drury in the 1890s and confessed by him in 1931, and no such scene exists in Pepys's real diary.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- tell it to the horse marines
- tell that to the marines
- that will do for the marines
Usage Examples
- You say the printer fixed itself while we were at lunch? Tell it to the marines, Kevin.
- Grandpa swore he once bowled a perfect game left-handed, and the whole family told it to the marines.
- The minister claims the bridge will open on budget this time; tell that to the marines, say locals.