(all) beer and skittles
Fun and enjoyable. "Skittles" is a British game that is similar to bowling. You've been working all weekend, so just come out with us for a little while—it'll be beer and skittles, I promise. Just because we get good perks doesn't mean this job is all beer and skittles. I know it's ugly having to see someone you cared about betray you like that, but life isn't all beer and skittles, you know.
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2024 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.
(all) beer and skittles
all fun and pleasure; easy and pleasant. (Skittles is the game of ninepins, a game similar to bowling. Fixed phrase.) For Sam, college was beer and skittles. He wasted a lot of time and money.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs. © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
beer and skittles
amusement. British This phrase comes from the proverb life isn't all beer and skittles . The game of skittles is used as a prime example of a form of light-hearted entertainment.
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary © Farlex 2017
beer and skittles
(...ˈskɪdlæz) n. something very easy to do; an easy time of it. Did you think life was all beer and skittles?
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions Copyright © 2006 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
beer and skittles, (life is) not all
Life is not all fun and games. Skittles, a kind of bowling game played by throwing wooden disks at pins, was very popular in Great Britain, where drinking beer remains a widespread form of recreation. Pairing the two came about quite naturally in the nineteenth century. Dickens’s Sam Weller assures Mr. Pickwick, who is about to enter a debtor’s prison, that the prisoners enjoy themselves there: “It’s a regular holiday to them—all porter and skittles” (Pickwick Papers). But Dickens’s contemporary Thomas Hughes observed that “Life isn’t all beer and skittles” (Tom Brown’s School Days). Essentially a British cliché, it spread to America but is heard less often today. Legendary adman David Ogilvy had it in Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963): “Managing an advertising agency is not all beer and skittles.”
The Dictionary of Clichés by Christine Ammer Copyright © 2013 by Christine Ammer