Noisy Arabs

Posted by Gary Martin July 11, 2009 at 07:51In reply to Noisy Arabs posted by Smokey Stover on July 06, 2009 at 00:19:

Something from the depths of memory - "Noisy Arabs" or "Shut-up you noisy Arabs". Phrases that I know and use but don't know from where they come.

I've never heard that one. But in the second half of the 19th century "city Arab" or "street Arab" was British slang for a homeless guttersnipe child, presumably because they were "nomads" of no fixed abode, like Bedouin. Perhaps your phrase derives from this? "Shut up you noisy guttersnipes" sounds pretty plausible to me.(VSD)

I think it would also sound plausible to the editors of the OED. Under guttershipe, after explaining that a snipe is a bird, they give, as one meaning:

"b. A child brought up 'in the gutter'; one of the lowest class; an urchin. Also attrib. and as adj.

[One example of many:] 1884 Century Mag. XXVIII. 557 The gutter-snipes and Arabs of the streets of Gravesend."

I don't know the origin but can recall my mother using it often to describe us unruly children. It was a commonplace expression there and then - the English West Midlands in the 1950s.