“ad fontes!”
The expression cold comfort means inadequate consolation for a misfortune. The adjective cold has long been used to mean felt as cold by the receiver, chilling, damping, discouraging. For example, the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1342-1400) wrote, in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale: (interlinear translation – Harvard College) Wommennes conseils been ful ofte colde; Women’s counsels […]
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Tip-Cat in A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy, and Pretty Miss Polly (1787 edition) The phrase to see which way the cat jumps means to see what direction events are taking before committing oneself. One of its earliest instances is from The Berkshire Chronicle […]
Read MoreIt is often said that the abbreviated form Xmas “takes the Christ out of Christmas”, but this is not the case. For example, a certain Reverend Thomas Eyre wrote to a Doctor Poynter on 25th January 1807: My Lord,—Your much esteemed favour of the 5th of December I received the day after Xmas. The noun Christ is from the Latin Christus, […]
Read MoreThe phrase like a cat on hot bricks and its American-English equivalent like a cat on a hot tin roof mean very agitated or anxious. An earlier form of the phrase was recorded by the English naturalist and theologian John Ray (1627–1705) in A Collection of English Proverbs (2nd edition – 1678): To go like […]
Read MoreThe Italian noun gianduia (improperly gianduja) appeared in the 19th century to denote a soft confection made with chocolate and ground hazelnuts, first produced in Turin, the capital of Piedmont, a region in north-western Italy, in the foothills of the Alps. (The Italian name is Piemonte, from piede, foot, and monte, mount.) This confection was […]
Read MoreThe phrase wouldn’t say boo to a goose is used to emphasise that someone is very timid. Here, boo is not an expression of disapproval but a later form of bo, an exclamation intended to frighten. In Notes and Queries of 10th September 1870, the English philologist Walter William Skeat (1835-1912) wrote: “Cry Bo to […]
Read More“I think we may say everything’s more or less oojah-cum-spiff. With one exception, Jeeves,” I said, a graver note coming into my voice as I gave Gus his second helping of kipper. “There remains a fly in the ointment, a familiar saying meaning—well, I don’t quite know what it does mean. It seems to […]
Read MoreMEANING to pay excessively, to be charged exorbitantly PROBABLE ORIGIN The expression to pay through the nose is first recorded in Piazza universale di proverbi Italiani, or, A common place of Italian proverbs and proverbial phrases digested in alphabetical order (1666), by Giovanni Torriano (floruit 1640): Oft-times Rich men engrossing commodities, will make one pay through the […]
Read MoreThe phrase the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing and variants express unawareness, or (deliberate) ignorance, of one’s own activities. This phrase is now mainly used to convey that there is a state of confusion within a group or organisation. But, in early use, it was an injunction to be discreet in […]
Read MoreThe Latin noun lupus/-pi meant wolf. It is kindred with ancient Greek λύκος (lukos). —Cf. lycanthrope, which originally designated a person who believes that he or she is a wolf, and which, via the modern Latin noun lycanthrōpus, is from Greek λυκάνθρωπος (lukanthropos), literally wolf-man, from λύκος and ἄνθρωπος (anthropos), man. The Latin lupus has sometimes been used in English in the sense of wolf; for instance, a Scottish […]
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