“ad fontes!”
UK, 1892—very rarely—refers to the fact that Preston Guilds are held only once every twenty years—Preston is the administrative centre of Lancashire, a county of north-western England, on the Irish Sea
Read MoreUK and USA, 1889—used of anything that is speciously high-class in appearance, but is commonplace in reality—‘Queen Anne’ means ‘beautiful’, as opposed to ‘Mary Ann’, meaning ‘vile’; ‘low’; ‘mean’
Read Moreinterwar period—Liverpudlian dockers—three days at work and three days on the dole—‘hook’ refers to the dockers’ tool, ‘book’ refers to the unemployment register
Read MoreUK, 1877—humorous: a holiday or period of leisure spent drinking alcoholic liquor—blend of the nouns ‘alcohol’ and ‘holiday’—has, in the course of time, been coined on separate occasions by various persons, independently from one another
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UK, 1920 (‘queue-jumper’)—literally: to push forward out of turn in a queue—figuratively: to obtain unfair priority over others—especially used since the 1930s in relation to compulsory queueing schemes implemented by public-transport authorities
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UK, 1997—the title given to the official resident cat of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at 10 Downing Street, London—‘mouser’, first recorded circa 1440, denotes an animal that catches mice
Read Morea small component of a much larger structure, system or process; an insignificant individual within a large population or community—commonly associated with ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, the title of a three-part composition by the British band Pink Floyd in their 1979 rock opera ‘The Wall’, but has been used since 1867
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UK, 1816—a meaningless bantering phrase—originated in a print published in June, satirising the fact that a bill on additional taxation on soap had been brought in unobtrusively in May by the Chancellor of the Exchequer
Read MoreUSA—‘in mothballs’ (1892): in a state or period of inactivity, disuse, reserve, storage or postponement—‘out of mothballs’ (1905): back into activity, into use
Read MoreUK, 1896—the clitoris—likens the clitoris, placed between the inner labia of the vulva, to a person in a boat
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