meaning and origin of ‘the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker’
UK, 1848—people of various professions; people of all kinds—alludes to ‘Rub a dub dub’, a nursery rhyme of the late 18th century
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meaning and origin of the phrase ‘blackboard jungle’
USA, 1955—the education system regarded as a place where the law of the jungle applies—from the title of a 1954 novel and of its 1955 film adaptation
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘tall poppy’
UK, 1816—successful person attracting envious hostility—from Tarquin’s decapitation of the tallest poppies to indicate the fate of enemies
Read Moremeaning and origin of the British phrase ‘to be all mouth and (no) trousers’
1961—to be all talk and no action—originally without the negative determiner ‘no’—refers to verbal and sexual arrogance
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘dirty work at the crossroads’
UK, 1906—dishonest or illicit dealings—probably alludes to crossroads as settings for sinister actions, in particular to their former use as burial places for suicides
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘plain Jane’
UK, 1898, in ‘plain Jane and no nonsense’—a dull or unattractive girl or woman—‘Jane’ chosen because it is common and rhymes with ‘plain’
Read Moreorigin of ‘bodkin’ (a person wedged between others)
isolated use in The Fancies, Chast and Noble (1638), by John Ford—1795 as ‘to ride bodkin’—seems to allude to the thinness of the tools that have that name
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘damp squib’ and of French ‘pétard mouillé’
UK, 1837—something intended, but failing, to impress—if damp, a squib [a small firework] will fail to work
Read Moremeaning and origin of the British phrase ‘(as) daft as a brush’
1892, as ‘mazed as a brish’ (Devon)—meaning: extremely stupid—possible origin: anything is daft that does all the hard work
Read More‘curiosity killed the cat’: meaning and origin
1868, but late 16th century as ‘care [= disquiet] killed a cat’—the image is perhaps that disquiet would exhaust the nine lives allotted to a cat
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