television programmes that are gratuitously shocking or sensational, or of poor quality—from their eliciting in the viewer a similar horrified fascination to that experienced by people watching scenes of cars crashing
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conveys derisive self-congratulation for an action that the speaker has done from a sense of duty rather than for pleasure—from a line uttered by Charles Laughton in the 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII
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Seems to have originated in a joke, first recorded in 1955, in which the Tower of London says to the Leaning Tower of Pisa: “I’ve got the time and you’ve got the inclination.”
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used in 1939 by Leo Rosten about U.S. actor W. C. Fields—has been wrongly attributed to the latter—but first used by U.S. journalist Byron Darnton, according to an article of 1937
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USA, 1992—the folds of loose skin or fat which hang from the undersides of a person’s upper arms—so named because they are common in older women, who are regarded as the type of person most likely to play bingo
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U.S. underworld phrase, 1931—The image is of a man whose hat is only a six-incher, but who needs a fifty-inch chest measurement in shirts.
Read Moreuncontrollable or obsessive passion—French phrase introduced in the 1960s as a theme of drama, prose narrative and cinema
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a deliberate malapropism punning on ‘I resent that remark’—USA, 1940
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U.S. slang, 2005—a gesture consisting in placing one hand on top of the other and wiggling the thumbs, made to reduce embarrassment
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the demand that an extraterrestrial makes to the first human being or animal it encounters after alighting from its flying saucer—USA, 1956—from a cliché in science-fiction stories
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