Who is as happy as a sand boy?
“Sandboy is the vulgar name of a small insect which may be found in the loose sand so common on the seashore. This insect hops and leaps in a manner strongly suggestive of jollity, and hence I imagine the simile arises”. “The usual explanation is mundane in the extreme: sandboys sold sand. The word boy here was a common term for a male worker of lower class (as in bellboy, cowboy, and stableboy), which comes from an old sense of a servant. It doesn’t imply the sellers were necessarily young, though one early description does mention urchins doing the selling. There’s no link, by the way, with the sandman, the personification of sleep, which came into English several decades later in translations of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. The selling of sand wasn’t such a peculiar occupation as you might think, as there was once quite a need for it. It was used to scour pans and tools and was sprinkled on floors. By the time that Henry Mayhew wrote about it in his London Labour and the Londo
