meaning and origin of the phrase ‘gas and gaiters’
coined by Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby (1839) in a comic passage in which an insane speaker makes a series of nonsensical statements
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meaning and origin of the phrase ‘to play possum’
‘to play possum’: American English, early 19th century—pretend to be dead, asleep, etc.—allusion to the opossum’s habit of feigning death when threatened
Read Moreorigin of ‘pipe dream’ (unattainable or fanciful hope or scheme)
pipe dream: American English, late 19th century—originally with reference to the kind of visions experienced when smoking an opium pipe
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘to have a bee in one’s bonnet’
This phrase is a transformation of ‘one’s head full of bees’, meaning scatter-brained, unable to think straight, as if bees are buzzing around in one’s head.
Read Morethe various meanings of the noun ‘owlhoot’
Coined after ‘cock-crow’, ‘owl-hoot’ means ‘dusk’. It denotes ‘an outlaw’ in Wild West fiction, hence, generally, ‘a worthless or contemptible person’.
Read Moreorigin of ‘slave’ and ‘Slav’, of ‘robot’ and of ‘ciao’
The word ‘slave’ is from Medieval Latin ‘Sclavus’, ‘Slav’, because the Slavic peoples were frequently reduced to a servile condition by the Germanic conquest.
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘like one o’clock’
‘like one o’clock’—mid 19th century, British: with speed, eagerness, energy; perhaps with reference to the lunchtime bustle in the northern manufacturing towns
Read Morea linguistic investigation into ‘paparazzi’
The noun ‘paparazzo’ is from the name of a photographer in La Dolce Vita (1960) by Federico Fellini. The choice of this name has been variously explained.
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘by hook or by crook’
The phrase perhaps originated in laws or customs regulating the gathering of firewood by tenants; it was perhaps a legal formula in which ‘crook’ merely reinforced ‘hook’.
Read Moresense evolution and origin of ‘conundrum’
The word ‘conundrum’, attested in 1596, originally meant ‘whimsy’, ‘oddity’. It perhaps originated as a parody of some Latin scholastic phrase.
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