<suggests geg re-reads robert's most recent sentence>

Please note my avoidance of the term "last sentence". I hope and expect that there will be many more.

What's colloquial about 'schnozz'? It's Yiddish.

How colloquial can you get?

Yer meshuggena yer.

Loathe though I am to defend robert, I'm not entirely sure that the use of Yiddish counts as a colloquialism.

The OED is curiously vague on the matter.....

Ironically a 'colloquialism' is a vulgar language unit which reflects contemporary use of the language in question.

I wonder how many colloquialism were used in the various languages in which the books collectively known as the Christian Bible? And hence how much has been misinterpreted by accident (as opposed to changes made for political purposes) and we now have a collection of wonderfully inconsistent fictions on which people base their moral values.

A 'colloquial;ism' is merely a word ahead of its time. Eventually it will become mainstream and be included in OED and Macquarie and by then it will be passe and another term will have come in to replace it.

Maybe 'virgin birth' was a sort of rhyming slang?

What for? Decreasing girth?

I don't know, but I think 'son of god' is a misreporting of a phrase that was probably like 'son of (female) dog'.

If only we knew for sure!!!!!