Yes, "clean and jerk" is now a weightlifting term (to lift and successfully support the weights are two different levels -- one at shoulder-height, or the "clean", the other with arms straight above the head, the "jerk"), but it came from the original weightlifters -- Eastern European immigrant women to the US. They often had 10 or more children in the fambly (accent declared), and as such the laundry load was wont to be 100lbs or greater, so the mother had to do a similar technique to carry it.

The reverse term could also apply to the fathers after the 5th or 6th kid....

I was having a drink with a few friends from Physics when one of them pointed to a nice-looking girl, but said "he once gave her out for hitting the ball twice." Was I right in choosing to avoid her then?

Yes "hitting the ball twice " is a reference to somebody who when first met was fantastically beautiful and well turned out but after a couple of dates turns into a smelly unkempt wretched figure who you wouldn't look twice at. The phrase originates from the story of Cinderella who arrived at the ball looking like a princess but by the time she left had already lost a shoe and arrived home looking like a tramp, one can only imagine what a subsequent trip to the ball would have resulted in.

Moisten the sand and old Bedouin saying but what was it about?

Before we stray too far (because then it will cease to be funny), from the subject of female weightlifters, the 'clean and jerk' is, of course, not the only discipline. It was reported, perhaps apocriphally, that an Olympic T.V. commentator had once described a Bulgarian girl as having a 'world-class snatch'.

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To 'Moisten the sand' could well refer to the Bedoiun behaviour of staggering out of the Camel and Scimitar at chucking-out time and finding no taxis of the desert waiting, chooses to relieve himself behind the bus-stop at the nearest oasis.

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I was somewhat perterbed the other day to hear something or other described as 'like throwing a Woodbine up Broad St' What do you think they were talking about?

Broad Street is a street in the middle of Oxford, and is indeed broad. The phrase refers the traditional May Day festival held there, which would commence at dawn with a competition to see who could throw a bunch of fragrant woodbine herbs up Broad Street the farthest. This would be followed by a race to sweep the resulting pile of woodbine all the way along the street. In the days of horse-drawn transport, this also served a useful function in cleaning and deodorising the road of unwelcome material. So metaphorically, throwing a woodbine up Broad Street means any way of transforming a necessary chore into a joyful activity. Try dropping this phrase into your next management meeting: "Let's throw a woodbine up Broad Street on this one and see where it drops."

What are hot boots and cold boots?

The remedy for cold feet and warm feet, respectively. D'OH.

In other words, "hot boots" are anything, be it an actual object, argument or other psychological device, used to convince someone to do something that s/he is scared to do (has "cold feet" about). Whereas "cold boots" is pretty much the reverse - anything, be it an actual object, argument or other psychological device, used to try and either extricate or at the very least calm down someone who *has* jumped into a situation feet-first only to find it "too hot to handle". Very often the person who was too scared to get into whatever situation it was, turns out to have been right in the first place, and giving them the cold-boots treatment is the only remedy for your own mistake of having given them the hot-boots treatment in the first place. The two concepts most often crop up in arguments between friends over a romantic relationship that one of them is either (a) not yet involved in, and too scared to start, or (b) has gotten involved in, found out that they were *right* to have been too scared to start but it's too late now as it's already started, and wants to try to find a way of reasoning themselves out of it again becuase they can't handle it: and it is the best mate that provides the warm- and cold-boots treatment successively and ill-advisedly ;-)

In the days when my father was a computer programmer, he would sometimes say that a hard day's work had in fact been turd-varnishing.