On Sat, 20 Jul 2013 01:27:21 +0200, Stephen wrote:

> On 20/07/2013 12:50 AM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Not initially, though.  They used "rob", which was a mix of sauerkraut
>> and a concentrated fruit juice mixture, which was boiled.  Well, I
>> guess the fruit juice concentrate could have been (or had as a
>> component) lemon, so fair play on that.:)
>>
>>> >There was some skulduggery going on at the time between us and the
>>> >rest of the world. And no one would sell the Brits lemons. So we used
>>> >limes from one of the islands in the Caribbean. Hence Limeys.
>> First recorded use of "Lime juicer" (which became "limey") to refer to
>> a Brit was 1859.
> 
> I did not know any of that. I only found out about the embargo,
> recently.
> I tried looking it up and guess it was another Stephen Fry lie, said in
> a convincing manor.

Well, I'll cop to my source being John Lloyd for that, and it wouldn't be 
the first time that I'd seen/heard something in one of his books that I 
knew wasn't quite correct.

OED cites an example from 1888 as its earliest citation, but OED doesn't 
always have the earliest, since the quotations are just examples. But it 
does confirm something I thought was the case, which is that it wasn't 
common to the US, but more common to other colonies, notably Australia, 
New Zeland, and South Africa. At least as an "English Immigrant".

In the US, the term comes along later (or at least the earliest quote 
citing it is later, 1918), referring to an English or British sailor. 
That actually does match up with the information in the Second Book of 
General Ignorance (the quotation uses "lime-juicer" to refer to the ship, 
and "limeys" to refer to the sailors).

But Mr. Fry doesn't do the research, generally, for QI.  I don't know 
that Lloyd does that much of it any more, either. ;)

Jim

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