> as lemmas

1840 Spirit of Times 21 Mar. 25/2 All of ‘vich’..fully accounts..for the milk in the cocoa-nut.

1853 Knickerbocker 42 50 The milk in the cocoa nut was accounted for.

1898 Mrs. E. Lynn Linton Let. in G. S. Layard Mrs. Lynn Linton (1901) xxiv. 362 The Koran is very interesting—but oh, the milk in the cocoanut! It is so queerly disjointed and non-sequential, far more so than the Epistles, and they have their full share of that milk in the cocoanut.

1922 J. Joyce Ulysses ii. xii. [Cyclops] 306 Hoho begob, says I to myself, says I. That explains the milk in the cocoanut and absence of hair on the animal's chest.

1928 ‘A. J. Alan’ Good Evening, Everyone! (ed. 3) 55 He then confessed that in a very weak moment he'd promised to write the play... I said: ‘Well, have you written it?’ And he said: ‘No, that's the milk in the coco-nut! When I said I would, I hadn't tried, and now I've tried, I find I can't’.

1972 L. Meynell Death by Arrangem. i. 17 ‘Nobody can really be christened Waveney: it's a river...’ ‘In East Anglia. Hence, as they say, the milk in the coconut. Rolffe's father..called his eleven children after East Anglian rivers.’