SHAGGY DOGS:FILTHY LUCRE is a phrase used to describe ill-gotten gains.
The word lucre derives from the Latin word lucrum, meaning profit, gain, greed, or wealth, and other similar Greek words for stolen goods.
The "filthy" part has just been added to reinforce the idea of dirty (ie stolen) money.
The Hindi word lut, translated as "stolen money", is pronounced lootby Indian people, which is how that word became part of our criminal slang during the 1800s.
If a situation is touch and go then it is a very close-run thing.
The phrase can be traced to the days of the horse-drawn carriage when there were no rules of etiquette and certainly no highway code.
Accidents, collisions and near misses were a common occurrence.
In the case of a full-blown collision, matters could become very complicated, as there was no insurance system in those days, few witnesses in the sparsely populated countryside and rarely any way to resolve matters fairly.
However, in the case of an accident that was fairly minor, it was usually regarded as touch and go, meaning that the carriages had barely touched each other, the damage was minor, and the occupants of each carriage could go on their way without repercussion.
A second theory suggests it is a nautical expression referring to when a ship's keel touches the seabed in shallow water, but the vessel is not completely grounded and hence left high and dry.
Instead, if the ship is able to move off again, the situation is known as touch and go.
The expression to be left high and dry is used to describe being stranded in a situation without support or resource, and has been in use since the early 1800s (dating from around the time of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805). The phrase was used to indicate a ship that had been left grounded (possibly it had been touch and go for a while) and then vulnerable to attack as the tide went out.
The captain of a ship that had been left high and dry could do nothing to resolve the situation until the tide turned and he could refloat his ship.
• Extracted from Shaggy Dogs and Black Sheepby Albert Jack (Penguin Books)