“ad fontes!”
Tip-Cat in A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy, and Pretty Miss Polly (1787 edition) The phrase to see which way the cat jumps means to see what direction events are taking before committing oneself. One of its earliest instances is from The Berkshire Chronicle […]
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The proper noun Disgusted (with initial capital D) was originally used as a self-designation by a member of the public writing anonymously to a newspaper in order to express outrage about a particular issue—cf. also meaning and history of ‘to write to The Times about it’. The earliest instance of this noun that I have found is […]
Read MoreIt is often said that the abbreviated form Xmas “takes the Christ out of Christmas”, but this is not the case. For example, a certain Reverend Thomas Eyre wrote to a Doctor Poynter on 25th January 1807: My Lord,—Your much esteemed favour of the 5th of December I received the day after Xmas. The noun Christ is from the Latin Christus, […]
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In the Etymologies (Etymologiarum sive Originum libri viginti), compiled between around 615 and the early 630s in the form of an encyclopaedia arranged by subject matter, St Isidore (circa 560–636), bishop of Seville and Doctor of the Church, wrote the following about the names of the fingers (the original Latin words are […]
Read MoreThe Italian noun gianduia (improperly gianduja) appeared in the 19th century to denote a soft confection made with chocolate and ground hazelnuts, first produced in Turin, the capital of Piedmont, a region in north-western Italy, in the foothills of the Alps. (The Italian name is Piemonte, from piede, foot, and monte, mount.) This confection was […]
Read MoreThe French masculine noun sanglier denotes a full-grown wild boar. It literally means a boar living on its own, separated from the herd, since, via Old and Middle French forms such as sengler and senglier, it is from the popular Latin singularis (porcus), solitary (pig) – cf. Middle-French terms such as porc sanglier, and in the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible, singularis ferus, the noun ferus meaning wild animal (cf. the […]
Read MoreIn The Tragedie of Macbeth (around 1603), by the English poet and playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Gray-Malkin is the name of a fiend in the shape of a grey she-cat, the cat being the form most generally assumed by the familiar spirits of witches according to a common superstition: (Folio 1, 1623) […]
Read MoreMEANING to have no hesitation in stating, or dealing with, something, however unpleasant or awkward it is ORIGIN Always used in the negative, this phrase dates back to the 16th century, originally as to make no bones at or in. It also occurred without a complement, as in its first recorded use, in The first tome or […]
Read MoreThe adjective fed up means annoyed, unhappy or bored, especially with a situation that has existed for a long time. The original, literal meaning is simply sated with food, since to feed up an animal or a person is to supply them with rich and abundant food. For example, the author of Whether Love be a natural or fictitious Passion, published in Pope’s Bath Chronicle of 3rd May 1764, wrote: The […]
Read MoreIn the chapter Our lunatic contributor of Words and names (1933), the British philologist Ernest Weekley (1865-1954) wrote: The correspondence columns of our middlebrow weeklies and of our two Sunday papers are the happy hunting-ground of the amateur etymologist. A few years ago he published the discovery that ‘nap,’ ‘a short sleep,’ was derived from Napoleon’s power of sleeping […]
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