Vigorous, well rested, full of energy. This simile has survived the much older fresh as a rose, used by Chaucer and seldom heard today. It dates from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Dickens used it to perfection in The Cricket on the Hearth (1845): “She presently came bouncing back—the saying is as fresh as any daisy; I say fresher.” The daisy’s name comes from the Old English daeges eage, meaning “day’s eye,” which refers to the flower’s yellow disk. Like many flowers, daisies close their petals in the evening, concealing the disk, and reopen them in the morning; possibly the simile alludes to this characteristic.

Be dead and buried. The phrase was first recorded in 1918, in one of Wilfred Owen’s poems about World War I, and alludes to flowers growing over a soldier’s grave in France. It soon passed into the civilian vocabulary, where it continues to refer to being dead. Georgette Heyer had it in Blunt Instrument (1938): “‘Where is the wife now?’ . . . ‘Pushing up daisies. . . . died a couple of years ago.’”