meaning and early instances of ‘small potatoes’
USA, early 19th century—‘small potatoes’: person or thing considered petty, unimportant, insignificant or worthless
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origin of ‘Froggy’ (French)
mid-19th cent.—perhaps from a specific application of the general term of abuse ‘Frog’, aided by the shared initial consonant cluster in ‘French’ and ‘frog’
Read Moremeanings and origin of ‘small beer’
‘small beer’: ‘person(s) or matter(s) of little or no importance’ (first use by Shakespeare), from the literal sense ‘beer of a weak, poor or inferior quality’
Read Moreorigin of ‘to have someone’s guts for garters’
The phrase ‘to have someone’s guts for garters’, used as a hyperbolical threat, is first recorded in the late 16th century.
Read Moreorigin of ‘all my eye and Betty Martin’
second half of the 18th century—a mere fanciful extension of ‘all my eye’—maintained in a sort of artificial life by persistent conjectures about its origin
Read Morethe authentic origin of ‘to bite the bullet’
late 19th century—from the practice consisting, for a soldier, in biting on a bullet when being flogged
Read MoreThe verb ‘unfriend’ was coined in the 17th century.
The verb unfriend was coined by the Church of England clergyman Thomas Fuller (1608-61) in The Appeal of Injured Innocence (1659).
Read Moreorigin of ‘according to Cocker’
according to Cocker: correctly; reliably—early 19th century, from the name of Edward Cocker (1631-75), English arithmetician, reputed author of a popular Arithmetick
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘according to Gunter’
‘according to Gunter’: correctly; reliably—early 18th century, from the name of the English mathematician Edmund Gunter (1581-1626)
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘neither fish nor fowl’
Origin: for purposes of fasting, food was divided into categories – ‘fish’, the flesh of fish, ‘flesh’, the flesh of land-animals, ‘fowl’, the flesh of birds.
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word histories 