for the birds

Example: “Waiting in line for three hours? That's for the birds.”

Origin: United States military slang, coined during the Second World War and first documented in print in October 1944, in the Massachusetts newspaper the Lowell Sun. The phrase is a shortened, cleaned-up version of the cruder 19th-century American expression "shit for the birds," itself rooted in a completely literal, everyday sight from the horse-drawn era: birds pecking through fresh horse manure on the street, scavenging for undigested grain and other edible scraps left behind. Something "for the birds," then, was originally manure — worthless, best left to whatever the birds could find in it — and the shortened wartime version kept that same dismissive judgment while dropping the vulgarity that gave it its bite.