meanings and origin of ‘the angels’ share’
UK, 1970—the quantity of distilled spirits lost to evaporation while ageing in wooden casks; the vapours resulting from this process—calque of French ‘la part des anges’
Read MoreCategory: USA & Canada
meaning and origin of the phrase ‘like a bride’s nightie’
Australia, 1969—used to denote a fast-moving person or situation—alludes to the quickness with which a bride’s nightdress comes off on the wedding night
Read More‘are there any more at home like you?’: usage and origin
chat-up line—from ‘Tell me, pretty maiden (I must love some one)’, a song of the musical comedy ‘Florodora’, produced in Britain in 1899 and in the USA in 1900
Read Morehistory of ‘did it hurt when you fell from heaven?’
originally a chat-up line that supposedly met a demand for originality (USA 1985)—while it soon became one of the favourite lines used by men, women loathe it
Read More‘how different is the home life of our own dear Queen’
a break with traditional values—at a performance of Anthony and Cleopatra, a Victorian lady allegedly contrasted Queen Victoria’s homelife to Cleopatra’s
Read Moremeaning and history of the phrase ‘feed the brute’
nourish your husband—1882 in ‘Vanity Fair’ (London)—popularised in 1885 by a cartoon by George du Maurier, published in ‘Punch, or the London Charivari’
Read Morethe phrase ‘two hairs past a freckle’ and variants
used as a jocular reply by a person who does not have a watch, when asked what the time is—also ‘half past a freckle’, ‘according to the hairs on my wrist’
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘little Audrey joke’
a joke involving a pun or double entendre opening with ‘but little Audrey just laughed and laughed because she knew’—January 1926, Kansas City Star (Missouri)
Read Morehistory of the phrase ‘(all) dressed (up) like a Christmas tree’
Britain and USA, early 1900s: over-elaborately dressed—since the mid-19th century, ‘like a Christmas tree’: overelaborateness, heterogeneousness, artificiality
Read Morethe birth of an American phrase: ‘Where’s the beef?’
January 1984—from a television advertisement for the hamburger chain Wendy’s, in which an elderly lady demands where the beef is in a huge hamburger bun
Read More
word histories 