happy-go-luckyadv.adj.n.

1672 W. Wycherley Love in Wood i. i You have your twenty guineas in your pocket for helping me into my service; and, if I get into Mrs. Martha's quarters, you have a hundred more—if into the widow's, fifty:—happy go lucky!

1699 True Relation Sir T. Morgan's Progress France 14 The Redcoats cry'd, Shall we fall on in Order, or Happy-go-lucky?

?1705 E. Hickeringill Vindic. Char. Priest-craft 27 Hittee missee, happy go lucky, as the blind Man kill'd the Crow.

1802 Sporting Mag. 20 272 Messrs. Hubbards resisted [the action] on the plea of having sold him ‘happy go lucky’ (meaning the purchaser was to take him with all faults, for better for worse.)

1863 C. Reade Hard Cash I. xiii. 323 Is this weather to go tearing happy-go-lucky up the Channel?

1909 N. Griffith Dorrien Carfax xxxiii. 284 The child strayed, happy-go-lucky, to the infringing woods.

1995 R. Ford Independence Day x. 356 A few fantasy players and their young-looking wives are strolling happy-go-lucky into the sunshine, gloved hands draped over soft shoulders.

1835 N. J. Wyeth Let. 6 Sept. (1899) 151 I am still happy go lucky with only a broken toe and two or three upsettings in cold water.

1856 C. Reade It is never too Late I. xv. 279 The first thing was to make Carter think and talk, which he did in the happy-go-lucky way of his class.

1863 C. Kingsley Water-babies vi. 241 There were never such comfortable, easy-going, happy-go-lucky people.

1880 T. McGrath Pictures from Ireland 7 Forced habits of industry not natural to the happy-go-lucky Celt.

1925 Amer. Mercury Aug. 413/2 Say what he will, he shrinks a little from the happy-go-lucky sexual codes which so many of the radicals avow.

2005 Times Lit. Suppl. 29 Apr. 36/3 What turned this happy-go-lucky child into a violent, haunted, destructive and self-destructive youth?

1835 London Lit. Gaz. 12 Sept. 584/2 A Dover man, named Wellard, who commanded an armed lugger of fourteen guns from Folkestone, the Happy-go-Lucky, apparently a favourite name with these characters.

1851 H. Melville Moby-Dick xxvii. 128 A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant.

1894 Times 22 Oct. 11 Happy-go-Lucky was fourth, and Gold Leaf last.

1911 J. M. Dean Rainier of Last Frontier iii. 36 They were an infernally cheerful lot, mainly happy-go-luckies recruited in the Rocky Mountain Belt, with a ‘Cockney’ and a ‘Greaser’ thrown in.

1978 Texas Monthly Dec. 195/1 A few happy-go-luckies engage in hardly any management at all, letting the beasts run nearly wild within their boundary fences to multiply or die.

2008 Courier Mail (Brisbane) (Nexis) 6 Dec. 10 The build-up to the Cronulla riots, a series of events that left a black mark against Australia's reputation as a nation of happy-go-luckys who believe in a fair go for all.

1878 Cornhill Mag. Apr. 391 The current had been flowing more evenly—everything had conspired to make the happy-go-lucky of his life more smooth than before.

1893 S. Pope in Times 9 June 8 There had been a good deal of ‘happy-go-lucky’ in the manner in which the election was conducted.

a1905 L. Wallace Autobiogr. (1906) I. xvi. 155 Every man reading who can remember the happy-go-lucky of his own lusty youth can imagine it.

1866 U.S. Service Mag. Mar. 193 We take heart again, and would fain believe the reign of Happy-go-luckiness is over in the history of America.

1928 S.P.E. Tract (Soc. for Pure Eng.) No. XXIX. xxix. 269 The fertility and happy-go-luckiness of Elizabethan English.

2008 Sunday Times (Nexis) 28 Dec. (Style section) 18 Anyone can shake a tail feather to the anti-ageist happy-go-luckiness of a disco tune.

1883 Time Nov. 590 A form of opinion which puts its trust in ‘the eyes and the sympathies and appetites’, and may be called happy-go-lucky-ism.

1889 Earl of Desart Little Chatelaine II. xxiv. 136 The atmosphere of happy-go-luckyism she had come into.

1915 Syst. Mag. of Business Feb. 164/1 The beauty of it is that it is a science without any happy-go-luckyism about it.