Eating in the Romance languages
In Latin, short words having complicated irregularities in their forms gave way to simpler words with regular patterns and longer phonetic individualities.
Read MoreCategory: literature
origin of the phrase ‘the land of Nod’
‘the land of Nod’: a state of sleep—punning allusion to the name of the region to which Cain went after he had killed his brother Abel (Genesis, 4:16)
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘everything but the kitchen sink’
The phrase ‘everything but the kitchen sink’, or ‘the kitchen stove’, and variants mean ‘practically everything imaginable’—origin: USA, early 20th century
Read Morethe colonial origin of the word ‘kidnap’
original meaning of ‘kidnap’, late 17th century—to steal or carry off children or others in order to provide servants or labourers for the American plantations
Read Morethe story of the fedora
US, 1883—from the craze generated by ‘Fédora’, an 1882 drama by Victorien Sardou and the name of its heroine, played in early productions by Sarah Bernhardt
Read Moreorigin of the word ‘geek’
19th century, northern England—apparently a variant of ‘geck’, of Germanic origin, meaning ‘a fool’, ‘a dupe’, ‘an oaf’
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘Pooh-Bah’
from the name of a character who holds many high offices in ‘The Mikado’ (1885), an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan
Read MoreWhy does ‘season’ mean both ‘a division of the year’ and ‘to flavour’?
‘to season’, from Old French ‘saisonner’: ‘to do something during the proper season’, hence ‘to make appropriate to the circumstances’, ‘to flavour (a dish)’
Read Morea Shakespearean phrase: ‘this mortal coil’
the troubles and activities of the world—literary or humorous, from Hamlet’s speech “to be or not be”—‘coil’: probably from Middle French ‘acueil’, encounter
Read Moreorigin of ‘a millstone round someone’s neck’
from the gospel of Matthew, 18:6: If someone causes a child to sin, it would be better for them to have a millstone hung around their neck and be drowned in the sea.
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word histories 