a brick 

noun (informal)

- a very helpful, kind person who can be trusted

- a reliable, trustworthy or helpful person

- a good fellow, especially someone good-hearted or selfless

Cambridge Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary, Webster’s New International Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN

The building sense of "brick" comes via Middle English and Middle Dutch bricke into English around the 15th century. The person sense is much younger. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates “a good, honest fellow” to 1840, and traces it “probably on notion of squareness (as in fair and square)” — the same metaphor that makes a square deal honest.

A popular legend credits the Spartan king Lycurgus, who reportedly gestured at his soldiers and said Sparta needed no walls because “every man is a brick.” It is a lovely story — but it appears in no ancient source and is best treated as folk etymology, not fact.

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WHAT TO DO WITH THE MAD
 

Calling someone “a brick” means they’re solid, dependable, and good to the core, and no one embodied that better than Fred Rogers, who spent his life teaching children how to hold themselves together, as in his song about handling anger:

What do you do with the mad that you feel  

When you feel so mad you could bite?  

When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong…  

And nothing you do seems very right?

What do you do?  

Do you punch a bag?  

Do you pound some clay or some dough?  

Do you round up friends for a game of tag?  

Or see how fast you go?

It’s great to be able to stop  

When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong,  

And be able to do something else instead  

And think this song:

I can stop when I want to  

Can stop when I wish  

I can stop, stop, stop any time.  

And what a good feeling to feel like this  

And know that the feeling is really mine.

Know that there’s something deep inside  

That helps us become what we can.  

For a girl can be someday a woman  

And a boy can be someday a man.

© McFeely-Rogers Foundation

This song first appeared on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and was later referenced during Rogers’ famous 1969 U.S. Senate testimony on public broadcasting.

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SYNONYMS

BRICK, diamond (BrE), gem, good egg, good sort, mensch, pillar of strength, rock, salt of the earth, stalwart, star, tower of strength, treasure

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:'

“Fred M. Roger’s is an example of a real BRICK.”

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