“ad fontes!”
The phrase to chop and change means to change one’s opinions or behaviour repeatedly and abruptly. Here, chop originally meant to barter, and change meant to make an exchange with; in other words, this was an alliterative repetitive expression, the two verbs having roughly the same meaning (cf. also, for example, the alliterative phrase to be part and […]
Read MoreThe phrase ‘to go to pot’ means ‘to be ruined or destroyed’, ‘to go to pieces’, ‘to deteriorate through neglect’. The allusion is to the cutting up of meat into pieces ready for the cooking-pot, as several 16th-century texts make clear.
Read MoreTwelfth Day denotes the twelfth day after Christmas, i.e. 6th January, on which the festival of the Epiphany is celebrated, and which was formerly observed as the closing day of the Christmas festivities. (Epiphany denotes the festival commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles in the persons of the Magi; via Old-French and Anglo-Norman forms such as epyphane (Modern […]
Read Morefrom army use on the Western Front during World War One: ‘cootie’, ‘body louse’, ‘cooty’, ‘infested with lice’, ‘coot’, ‘louse’, probably ultimately refer to the aquatic bird called ‘coot’, reputed to be lice-infested
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some characteristic slang creations of the British, U.S. and French soldiers during World War One, as recorded in ‘Trench Talk’, published in Everybody’s Magazine (New York) of January 1918
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early 20th century—‘Zeppelins in a cloud’ and variants mean ‘sausage and mash’—during World War One, the phrase was used as a manner of disregarding the fear caused by the bombing raids carried out by Zeppelin airships
Read MoreAn expression of indifference to, or resigned acceptance of, a state of affairs, ‘san fairy ann’ jocularly represents the French phrase ‘ça ne fait rien’, meaning ‘that doesn’t matter’. It originated in army use on the Western Front during the First World War.
Read More18th century—origin unknown—perhaps originally imitative and comparable to, or derived from, ‘tantara’, denoting the sound of a trumpet, hence an uproar—or from obsolete French ‘trantran’, synonym of ‘tantara’
Read MoreEtymologically, a jewel is a little game, a little plaything: ‘jewel’ is from a French diminutive of ‘jeu’, meaning ‘a game’, ‘a play’. The word ‘bijou’ is from Breton ‘bizou’, meaning ‘a finger-ring’, from ‘biz’, ‘finger’.
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The name ‘Indian summer’ (late 18th century) reflected the fact that to the Europeans living in the New World, this was a newly-discovered local phenomenon. But similar phenomena were already known in the Old World by various names.
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