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We had a woman from the UK giving a presentation on risk assessment. Her frequent use of UK-centric sayings got some of us curious, so we asked her about some.
One was "Fill your boots", which apparently means to take full advantage of a situation. When asked about the origins of "Everything going pear-shaped", she said it means when things go suddenly badly, but didn't know the origins. I said it came from 19th century boiler technology, which was in its infancy. When a boiler is about to rupture, the bottom will swell, going pear-shaped.
I then explained that I had just made it up on the spot, but nobody heard that part, so I fully expect to see the explanation in wikipedia some day.
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