‘jot’ and ‘tittle’ used in collocation
‘every tiny detail’—from Matthew, 5:18—‘jot’, from ‘iōta’, the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet—‘tittle’, a small mark used in writing or printing
Read MoreCategory: literature
the origin of the word ‘bully’?
noun (late 17th cent.), perhaps from ‘bull’ (= bovine)—possibly distinct from ‘bully’ (mid-16th cent.), ‘darling’, probably from Middle Dutch ‘boele’, ‘lover’
Read Moreorigin of ‘to don’ and ‘to doff’
coalesced forms of the obsolete phrasal verbs ‘to do on’ and ‘to do off’, meaning respectively ‘to put on’ and ‘to take off’ (an item of clothing)
Read Moreorigin of the word ‘ado’
from ‘at do’ (meaning ‘to do’)—construction ‘to have’ + pronominal object (e.g. ‘much’) + ‘at do’ led to ‘ado’ reinterpreted as a noun qualified by an adjective
Read Morethe legendary origin of ‘a Roland for an Oliver’
meaning: ‘tit for tat’—Oliver was a full match for his comrade Roland, the legendary nephew of Charlemagne in ‘La Chanson de Roland’ and other romances
Read MoreHow hornbooks are at the origin of ‘criss-cross’.
phonetic reduction of ‘Christ’s cross’; first element phonetically reduced as in ‘Christmas’; hence ‘criss-cross’ treated as a reduplication of ‘cross’
Read Moreorigin of ‘blanket’ and of phrases containing ‘blanket’
‘blanket’: from Old-Northern-French and Anglo-Norman forms such as ‘blankete’ (white woollen material), composed of ‘blanc’ (white) and the diminutive suffix ‘-ette’
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘on the spur of the moment’
UK, 1784—elaborated on the archaic ‘on the spur’, which meant ‘in great haste’ and referred to the use of spurs to urge a horse forward
Read MoreWhy ‘ache’ ought to be written ‘ake’.
The spelling ‘ache’ (erroneously derived from Greek ‘ákhos’) instead of ‘ake’ is largely due to Samuel Johnson in A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).
Read Moreorigin of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’
first recorded in ‘Hudibras’ (1664), by Samuel Butler—from the first half of ‘Proverbs’, 13:24: “Whoever spares the rod hates their children.”
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