“ad fontes!”
MEANING The phrase to beggar belief (or description) means to be too extraordinary to be believed (or described). ORIGIN The literal meaning of the verb to beggar is to make a beggar of, exhaust the means of, reduce to beggary. It came to be used figuratively to mean to exhaust the resources […]
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Old York: the Shambles – illustration by Charles G. Harper for his book The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland: York to Edinburgh (1901) (The pavements are raised either side of the cobbled street to form a channel where the butchers would wash away the offal and blood.) MEANING […]
Read MoreThe phrase to carry coals to Newcastle means to supply something to a place where it is already plentiful; hence, figuratively, to do something wholly superfluous or unnecessary—cf. also to sell refrigerators to the Eskimos and to sell sand in the Sahara. This phrase (in which coals is an obsolete plural) refers to Newcastle upon Tyne, in […]
Read MoreMEANING a young man paid or financially supported by a woman, typically an older woman, to be her escort or lover ORIGIN In English, gigolo originally denoted a professional male dancing-partner. One of its first users was the American novelist, short story writer and playwright Edna Ferber (1885-1968) in Gigolo, which was published in […]
Read MoreMEANING to smell a rat: to detect something suspicious ORIGIN The first known use of this phrase is in The Image of Ipocrysy, an anonymous poem written around 1540, denouncing “the cruell clergy”: (published in 1843) Suche be owr [= our] primates, Our bisshopps and prelates, Our parsons and curates, With other […]
Read MoreThe word teetotum, which dates back to the 18th century, denotes a small four-sided disk or die having an initial letter inscribed on each of its sides, and a spindle passing down through it by which it could be twirled or spun with the fingers like a small top, the letter which lay uppermost, when […]
Read MoreThe phrase to sleep like a top means to sleep very soundly. In A Concise Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1993), B. A. Phythian explains that, unlikely as it may seem, the top referred to here is the child’s toy which seems not to be moving when it is spinning, though it wobbles when being […]
Read Morean alternative explanation of the phrase “it is raining cats and dogs”
Read MoreFirst recorded circa 1629 as ‘to rain dogs and cats’, this phrase is based on a cat-and-dog fight as a metaphor for a storm or hard rain; the theory that Jonathan Swift coined the phrase is ludicrous.
Read MoreSexual puns in 17th-century English theatre explain several meanings of ‘P’s and Q’s’.
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