‘chateau tap-water’ | ‘Château-la-Pompe’

tap-water likened to a grand cru—in reference to ‘château’ in names of wines of superior quality—in French ‘Château-la-Pompe’ (i.e. ‘Château-the-Pump’), ‘pompe’ denotes a device for raising water

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‘Iron Weathercock’ (as applied to Liz Truss)

UK, 2022— translates French ‘girouette de fer’—a derisive nickname for Liz Truss, in reference both to ‘Iron Lady’ (a nickname for Margaret Thatcher) and to Liz Truss’s changing views on a variety of subjects

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‘Generals January and February’: meaning and origin

personify January and February as army commanders, especially in reference to winter as detrimental or destructive to a military campaign—apparently coined by Russian Prince Alexander Menshikov in 1855, during the Crimean War

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‘General Winter’: meaning and origin

personifies the winter season as an army commander, especially in reference to winter as detrimental or destructive to a military campaign—UK, 1777, in reference to the War of American Independence

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‘to shoot the cat’: meaning (and origin?)

to vomit, especially from drunkenness—slang, obsolete—1609 as ‘to jerk the cat’—perhaps alludes to the fact that cats are prone to vomit—cf. also the obsolete French verb ‘renarder’, to vomit, from the noun ‘renard’, denoting a fox

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‘panier de crabes’: meaning and origin

1942—an arena of fierce or ruthless rivalry—borrowed from French: literally ‘basket of crabs’—the image is of crabs fighting, if not devouring one another, when kept in a basket

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The meaning of ‘temptation’ in the Lord’s Prayer

[Preliminary note: All the biblical quotations in English are from the New International Version (2011).] Le Notre-Père, the French version of the Lord’s Prayer, was revised in La Bible : Traduction officielle liturgique (Paris: Éditions Mame, 2013), the official liturgical translation of the Bible. French-speaking Catholics used to say: Et ne nous soumets pas à la […]

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notes on the noun ‘Goddam’

designates an Englishman—originated among the French, from the fact that they regarded the exclamation ‘God damn’ as characteristic of the English—the Middle-French synonym ‘godon’ may be etymologically unrelated

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