meaning and origin of ‘to warm the cockles of one’s heart’
late 17th century—probably based on the resemblance between the shape of the heart and that of a cockleshell – or of the body the shell protects
Read MoreCategory: French/English
meaning, origin and synonyms of ‘a snake in the grass’
1696—perhaps from ‘latet anguis in herba’ (a snake hides in the grass) in Virgil’s Eclogues—cf. ‘a pad [= toad] in the straw’ and French ‘il y a de l’oignon’
Read Moreorigin of the word ‘skinflint’
attested 1699—from the hyperbolical phrase ‘to skin a flint’ (1656)—cf. ‘to skin a flea for its hide and tallow’ and French ‘tondre un œuf’ (‘to shave an egg’)
Read Moreorigin of the phrase ‘to cut both ways’
to serve both sides of an argument; to have both good and bad effects—England, early 18th century—refers to a sword which has two cutting edges
Read Morean oxymoronic word: ‘oxymoron’
The word ‘oxymoron’ has the property it denotes: it is from Greek ‘oxús’, meaning ‘sharp’, ‘acute’, and ‘mōrόs’, meaning ‘dull’, ‘stupid’.
Read Moreorigin of the phrase ‘place in the sun’
traceable to Pensées, by Blaise Pascal (1623-62); modern use apparently originated in a speech made in December 1897 by the German statesman Bernhard von Bülow
Read Moremeaning and origin of the word ‘incunabula’
Latin ‘incunabula’: ‘swaddling clothes’, hence ‘beginning’—denotes the early printed books (from the 1450s to the end of the 15th century)
Read MoreEating in the Romance languages
In Latin, short words having complicated irregularities in their forms gave way to simpler words with regular patterns and longer phonetic individualities.
Read Morea curious case of misunderstanding in the Oxford English Dictionary
‘Wash the milk off your liver’: refers to the digestibility of milk, but misunderstood by the Oxford English Dictionary as referring to cowardice
Read Moremeaning and origin of the word ‘cicerone’
early 18th century—from the name of the Roman orator and author Marcus Tullius Cicero, apparently in allusion to the eloquence and learning of these guides
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