Being fobbed off means “to put off deceitfully; to attempt to satisfy with something of inferior quality or something less than one has been led to expect”.
There are a few stories going around about how being “fobbed off” came into being, so if you want the entire rundown go to this fascinating website A Phrase a Day, at: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fobbed-off.html
But the short of it is this: it came from Middle English “fobben”; from “fob”, meaning trickster; from German “foppen” meaning to trick.
Well, I will tell you that I am taking the GRE in a little less than a month and have been trying to study. I was never very good at studying, and I hardly had to do it in college. I was an English major. We mostly had essays instead of tests. When there was an exam, it was on a book or something we’d read…and we wrote an essay. (Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, that’s all I’m essay’n.*) You either knew the material, or you didn’t. For four years of higher education, I rarely had to memorize anything. (Rote? Is that anything like “wrote”?) I watched my friends and roommates study and recite formulas, dates, chemicals, economic principles, Chinese vocabulary. It looked hard.
Reginald, if you love words, you may want to check out the Word Dynamo website, it’s a fun site for a wordmeister!
The Cockney rhyming slang version of ‘pig’s ear’ is easy to explain. It’s one of the earliest examples of Cockney rhyming slang and appears in D. W. Barrett’s Life; Work among Navvies, 1880. “Now, Jack, I’m goin’ to get a tiddley wink of pig’s ear.” That’s easy enough to decipher as “I’m going to get a drink of beer”, although you would need a Cockney for an explanation of why ‘tiddley wink of pig’s ear’ was thought to be an improvement on ‘drink of beer’. ‘Pig’s ear’ rhymes with ‘beer’ and that’s usually enough for rhyming slang. Franklin’s Dictionary of Rhyming Slang lists several alternatives for ‘beer’ – ‘Charlie Freer’, ‘far and near’, ‘never fear’, ‘oh my dear’, ‘red steer’, ‘Crimea’, and ‘fusilier’ but ‘pig’s ear’ has always been the most popular.