“ad fontes!”
The colloquial terms bag of mystery and mystery bag denote a sausage, a saveloy. The British lexicographer John Stephen Farmer (1854-1916) gave the following explanations in Slang and its Analogues Past and Present ([London]: Printed for subscribers only, 1890): Bags of mystery (common).—Sausages and saveloys are so called—from the often mysterious character of their compounds. Presumably composed […]
Read MoreThe phrase money for old rope has various meanings: a profitable return for little or no trouble; a very easy job; a person or thing easy to profit from or to beat. The earliest occurrence of this phrase that I have found is from Driffield Coursing Club. “Peter Delmas” in the genial crowd, published in The Daily Mail (Hull, Yorkshire, England) […]
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advertisement published in The Times (London) on 18th December 1800: A CARD.—If the Lady who a Gentleman handed into her carriage from Covent Garden Theatre, on Wednesday, the third of this month, will oblige the Advertiser with a line to Z. Z., Spring Garden Coffee House, saying if married or single, she will […]
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used to indicate that someone has finally realised something—UK, 1931—alluded originally to the mechanism of a penny-in-the-slot machine
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photograph of William Archibald Spooner in The Leeds Mercury (Yorkshire) of Monday 1st September 1930 There is a rather awkward moment in “An Italian Straw Hat” when Laurence Payne, as a young bridegroom, looking desperately into the auditorium of the Old Vic, cries: “The thick plottens!” Hearing this elementary Spoonerism, graver members of the […]
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detail from the frontispiece to The Life of an Actor (1825), by Pierce Egan The phrase to get, or to give, the bird means to receive, or to show, derision, to be dismissed, or to dismiss. It originated in theatrical slang and referred to the ‘big bird’, that is, the goose, which hisses as people do when they make a sound of disapproval […]
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The white cliffs of Dover— to which the name Albion did not originally refer [cf. note]. (photograph: Wikimedia Commons/Fanny) The name Albion first appeared in English in the very first sentence of the first Book of the 9th-century translation of Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People) originally written by the English monk, […]
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The noun Greek has long been used in the sense of unintelligible speech or language, gibberish, and the phrase it’s (all) Greek to me means I can’t understand it at all. This expression is well known from The Tragedie of Julius Cæsar (1599), by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616): (Folio […]
Read MoreThe adjective teetotal in the sense of choosing, or characterised by, total abstinence from all alcohol seems to have first been used about September 1833 by Richard Turner, a worker from Preston, Lancashire, in a speech advocating total abstinence from intoxicating liquors, in preference to abstinence from ardent spirits only (as practised by some early […]
Read MoreThe primary meaning of the humorous pseudo-French British-English expression nul points is: a score of zero points in the Eurovision Song Contest, in which the points awarded by each country are announced in both English and French. This expression is composed of: – the French adjective nul, meaning no (that is, not one); the choice of […]
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