“ad fontes!”
Australia, 1941—used of any adverse situation—based on the rhyme between ‘crook’ (meaning ‘bad’, ‘unpleasant’, ‘unsatisfactory’) and ‘Tallarook’, the name of a town in Victoria—sometimes followed by ‘there’s no work in Bourke’
Read MoreFrance, 1891; UK, 1908—a sandwich filled with ham and cheese, and toasted or grilled—from ‘croque’, conjugated form of the verb ‘croquer’, to bite, to crunch, and the noun ‘monsieur’ (the reason that this noun was chosen is unknown)
Read MoreUSA, 1925—With, of course, a pun on ‘pee’, meaning ‘to urinate’, the jocular phrase ‘silent like (the) ‘p’ in swimming’ is used when exposing a difficulty in pronunciation.
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a deliberate malapropism punning on ‘to cast aspersions on’—UK, 1902—nasturtiums are low plants with large round leaves and orange, red or yellow flowers
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broken English—UK, 1883—from ‘English As She is Spoke: or A Jest in Sober Earnest’ (London: Field & Tuer, 1883), title given to a book intended as a Portuguese-English conversational guide
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a comma immediately preceding the conjunction in a list of items—1978—named after the preferred use of such a comma in the house style of Oxford University Press
Read Moreto have no idea at all—Scotland, 1990—‘scooby’ (short for ‘Scooby Doo’, name of cartoon dog in U.S. television series and films): rhyming slang for ‘clue’
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to have no idea at all—UK, 1913, shortening of ‘not to have the foggiest idea’ and variants (mid-19th century)—adjective ‘foggy’ means hazy, vague
Read MoreUK and USA, World War One—borrowing from French, literally ‘it is war’—expresses acceptance of, or resignation at, the situation engendered by war
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The letter ‘s’ in both the nouns currently spelt ‘island’ and ‘aisle’ is due to folk-etymological association of those words with the unrelated noun ‘isle’.
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word histories 