“ad fontes!”
‘parting shot’ (1817); ‘Parthian shot’ (1822): a sharp, telling remark, act, gesture, etc., made in departing—‘parting shot’: literally the final shot fired at the moment of departure—‘Parthian shot’: refers to the Parthian horsemen’s habit of shooting arrows backwards while in real or pretended retreat
Read MoreScotland, 1825 (as ‘bane idle’)—England, 1839—utterly lazy or indolent—‘bone’ seems to be used as an intensifier with adverbial force in the sense ‘through to the bone’, i.e., ‘deeply and fundamentally’
Read MoreUSA, 1843—With reference to a dog used for hunting game, this phrase is used to express the opinion that a particular plan or approach will not succeed.
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has been used to denote evidence of a de facto relationship affecting a woman’s eligibility for Social-Security benefits—refers to past practices of field officers inspecting homes and bedrooms
Read MoreUSA, 1837—to make assumptions about someone or something based on appearance or on superficial characteristics—the metaphor occurs in the preface to ‘Truth in Fiction: Or, Morality in Masquerade. A Collection of Two hundred twenty five Select Fables of Æsop, and other Authors’ (London, 1708), by Edmund Arwaker
Read MoreUSA—‘wishful thinking’, 1915: thinking in which one, consciously or unconsciously, interprets facts as one would like them to be rather than as they really are—‘wishful thinker’, 1917: a person who, consciously or unconsciously, interprets facts as he or she would like them to be rather than as they really are
Read MoreUSA, 1911—used to express the belief that everyone should have access not only to basic sustenance, but also to the finer things in life, such as education, art, literature, etc.—adapted from ‘Bread for all, and Roses too’ (1911), a slogan in the fight for women’s rights
Read MoreAustralia, 1828—Ireland, 1832—a group of things or people in its entirety—‘box’ refers to a box from which dice are thrown in gaming or gambling
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Australia and New Zealand, 1939—to be in good spirits, ‘chirpy’—the image is of a boxful of chirping birds (cf. the extended form ‘happy as a bird in a box of birdseed’)—New-Zealand variant ‘to be a box of fluffy ducks’, also ‘to be a box of fluffies’
Read MoreUSA, 1856—to ask someone young, ill-equipped or inexperienced to do difficult or complicated work—this phrase usually occurs in negative contexts, especially as ‘never send a boy to do a man’s work’
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