While I was watching the Dragons go around in the NRL last night, and an obvious officiating blunder occurred, someone in the lounge room sounded out " Blind Freddy could have seen that". I then thought to myself, who is/was Blind Freddy. So then I went googling and found the following:
"A very unperceptive person; such a person as a type. This term often appears in the phrase even blind Freddy could see that. Although the term may not derive from an actual person, early commentators associate it with a blind Sydney character or characters." Australian lexicographer Sidney Baker wrote in 1966 that 'Legend has it that there was a blind hawker in Sydney in the 1920s, named Freddy, whose blindness did not prevent his moving freely about the central city area'. Other commentators suggest a character who frequented various Sydney sporting venues in the first decades of the 20th century could be the original Freddy. The term itself is first recorded in 1911.
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