Here’s one for the gamblers. I haven’t inflicted one of my interesting (to me) word/phrase origins on you for some time. So, here goes.
“No dice” — what a person says when he refuses to accept a proposition or course of action.
In the early 1900s in many states, dice-gambling was popular but illegal. How to get around the law? Hide the dice when the cops came, of course. That way, the main evidence against you—the dice—couldn’t be produced in court, leading to your case being dismissed. So that’s what gamblers did: hid the dice, and sometimes even swallowed them!
A reporter for The Port Arthur Daily News (Texas) wrote a story in 1921 about when an officer testified at trial and admitted that he could not find any dice when he arrested the defendants. The judge ruled that the defendants could not be convicted because there were “no dice.”
It is considered highly probable that the “no dice = no conviction” decision is the origin of today’s use of “no dice” to mean “nothing doing.”