“ad fontes!”
UK, 1823—‘a hurried departure at night, especially from rented accommodation to avoid payment of rent owed’—‘flit’, noun use of ‘to flit’, originally used in Scotland and Northern England to mean ‘to move house or leave one’s home’
Read MoreUK, 1831—to startle or upset a sedate or conventionally-minded community—most probably from the following lines in The Tragedy of Coriolanus (circa 1607), by William Shakespeare: “like an eagle in a dove-cote, I | Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioli”
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British English, armed forces, 1936—With reference to the bluebottle fly, the colloquial phrase ‘like a blue-arsed fly’ is used to describe someone engaged in constant, frantic activity or movement.
Read MoreUSA, 1930—‘to crawl, or to come, out of the woodwork’: of an unpleasant or unwelcome person or thing, to come out of hiding, to emerge from obscurity; the image is of vermin or insects crawling out of crevices or other hidden places in a building
Read Morefirst recorded in the United Kingdom in 1914, with reference to the civilizational implication of the German invasion of Belgium at the beginning of World War One; therefore, not first used by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941)
Read MoreUK, 1962—the time after which programmes unsuitable for children are broadcast on television—from the image of a dividing line between two different sorts of programmes
Read MoreUK, 1788—denotes an auction in which the price is lowered by stages until a buyer is found—said to have been invented by the Dutch specifically as the best solution to selling tulip bulbs
Read More‘double Dutch’, 19th century—from ‘Dutch’ in the sense of a language that few people can speak, and ‘double’ as a mere intensifier—‘High Dutch’, 17th century—loan translation from French ‘haut allemand’ (= ‘High German’), used in the sense of gibberish
Read MoreUK, 1797—strength or confidence gained from drinking alcohol—alludes to the drinking habits ascribed to the Dutch—one of the phrases in which ‘Dutch’ is used derogatorily, largely because of the enmity between the English and the Dutch in the 17th and 18th centuries
Read MoreUK, 1967—chiefly British—‘bums on seats’: the members of an audience, at a theatre, cinema or other place of entertainment, especially when viewed as a source of income
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word histories 