‘thank your mother for the rabbit(s)’: meanings and early occurrences
UK and Ireland, since 1913—this jocular phrase has been used as an ironic expression of gratitude and as a goodbye
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‘if my aunt had balls’ | ‘si ma tante en avait’
used to rebuke an unrealistic conditional—USA, 1808: ‘if my aunt had been my uncle, what would have been her gender?’—France, 1843: ‘si ma tante était un homme, ça serait mon oncle’ (‘if my aunt were a man, that would be my uncle’)
Read More‘dead and never called me mother’: meaning and origin
used to characterise melodrama—from the words said over her dead child by Lady Isabel in East Lynne (1874), T. A. Palmer’s stage play adapted from the 1861 novel by the English author Mrs. Henry Wood (Ellen Price)
Read More‘is your father a glazier?’: meaning and early occurrences
UK, 18th century—addressed to one who stands between the speaker and the light of a window, a lamp, a candle or a fire, or, more generally, to one who obstructs the speaker’s view
Read More‘as camp as a row of tents’: meaning and early occurrences
1951—with pun on the noun ‘camp’ (i.e.: encampment): extremely camp (i.e.: ostentatiously and extravagantly effeminate; deliberately exaggerated and theatrical in style)
Read More‘a word in your shell-like’: meaning and origin
a word in confidence—UK, 1927—‘shell-like’ elliptical for ‘shell-like ear’, which was originally a poetical term associating the shape of the external ear with the graceful convolutions of a small pink seashell
Read More‘one may as well have the game as the name’
American English, 1823—meaning: if one is falsely reputed to act in a specific manner, then one may as well act in that manner
Read More‘calligram’: meaning, origin and early occurrences
a word or piece of text in which the design and layout of the letters creates a visual image related to the meaning of the words themselves—from French ‘calligramme’, coined in 1918 by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire—from ‘calligraphie’ and ‘idéogramme’
Read More‘thrown out of better places than this’: meaning and early occurrences
USA, 1909—a derogatory description of a specific place or occupation, typically used by somebody who is getting expelled from this specific place or occupation
Read More‘stand and grow good’: meanings and origin
UK, 1862—originally said to children in order that they develop an upright posture—came to be humorously used when declining a proffered seat
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