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This is the Keep Your English Up to Date podcast from BBClearning English.com.

In this week's programme, John Aetto explores the origin meaning and use of the word

bottle and bottler.

Brown the bottler, the placard said.

Gordon Brown had recently taken over as Prime Minister of Britain in 2007 and he'd been thinking of holding a general

election to confirm his leadership.

Then he suddenly seems to have been struck by terrible doubts over whether he'd win.

So he decided not to have an election after all.

His enemies accused him of being scared, of, to use a different metaphor,

chickening out. And that's what Botler means in British slang,

a person who lacks the courage to go through with something. But why? It all goes back to a

rather strange use of bottle to mean bravery or nerve which has been around for nearly a century now. So if

someone has lost their bottle they've lost their nerve, they're afraid. The verb to bottle soon followed. You could

bottle out of something, or simply bottle it if you didn't have the guts to do it.

And so we got bottler.

But the original question why remains.

There's an old slang expression, no bottle, meaning no good, which

may have something to do with it, and it's often claimed that it's linked with Cockney Rhyming-Slang, bottle and glass.

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