‘pound shop’: meanings and origin
UK & Ireland—a shop that sells a wide range of goods at low prices, typically one pound or less—hence also: of the type or quality found in a pound shop, cheap, second-rate
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a British use of ‘satellite alley’
1990—a street in which many satellite dishes are attached to the front of the buildings—‘satellite dish’: a bowl-shaped antenna used to view satellite television
Read More‘knocker-up’ (a wakener-up)
Ireland & Britain, 1850—a person who goes round the streets in the early morning to awaken factory hands—from ‘to knock somebody up’, meaning ‘to awaken somebody by knocking at the door’
Read More‘(as) poor as Job’s cat’: meaning and origin
‘extremely poor’—USA, 1810—humorous variant of ‘(as) poor as Job’, from the name of the eponymous protagonist of a book of the Old Testament, taken as the type of extreme poverty
Read More‘scholasticide’: meaning and origin
the systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel—apparently coined in 2009 by Karma Nabulsi, Fellow in Politics at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford
Read More‘old boy network’: meaning and origin
UK, 1950, as ‘old boy net’—a system of favouritism and preferment operating among people of a similar social, usually privileged, background, especially among former pupils of public schools
Read More‘nepotism baby’ and ‘nepo baby’: meaning and origin
a person whose career is believed to have been advanced by having a famous or successful relative—‘nepotism baby’ (USA, 1915)—‘nepo baby’ (USA, 2022)
Read More‘corridor care’ and ‘corridor nursing’: meaning and origin
Ireland, 1989—treatment given to hospital patients in overcrowded and inappropriate spaces such as corridors and waiting rooms—had been used earlier (UK, 1980) of treatment given to schoolchildren
Read Morenotes on ‘Kleenex’ in similes
USA, 1945—‘Kleenex’ (a proprietary name for a soft, disposable paper tissue) is used in similes expressing, in particular, disposability, ephemerality, fragility, weakness
Read More‘not on your nelly’: meaning and origin
‘not under any circumstances’—Royal Air Force slang, 1942—short for ‘not on your Nelly Duff’, i.e., ‘not on your life’, ‘Nelly Duff’ being rhyming slang for ‘puff’ as used colloquially in the sense of ‘life’
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word histories 