‘brolly hop’: meaning and origin
UK, 1933—a jump made with a parachute—hence also the verbal noun ‘brolly-hopping’ and the verb ‘brolly-hop’—‘brolly’ (university slang, late 19th century): a clipped and altered form of ‘umbrella’
Read More‘fatberg ’ | ‘concreteberg’
UK—2008 ‘fatberg’, after ‘iceberg’: a large mass of fat and waste material in a sewerage system—originally a large lump of congealed cooking fat washed up on a beach—2019 ‘concreteberg’, after ‘fatberg’: a large mass of concrete in a sewerage system, consisting of cement that has been poured down a drain
Read More‘motherhood and apple pie’: meaning and origin
USA, 1956—denotes a core principle, value, belief, characteristic, aspect, etc., of the U.S.A. or its citizens—more generally, the nouns ‘motherhood’ and ‘apple pie’ have been juxtaposed in enumerations of things and persons exemplifying U.S. values
Read More‘loony doctor’: meaning and origin
from 1924 onwards in stories by English author P. G. Wodehouse—a facetious appellation for a medical practitioner specialising in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness—‘loony’: shortened form of ‘lunatic’
Read More‘the men in (the) white coats’: meaning and origin
USA, 1936—psychiatrists or psychiatric workers—refers to the traditional use of white coats by medical personnel—often used in the stereotypical image of a mentally-disordered person being borne away to a psychiatric hospital by psychiatric workers
Read More‘boustrophedon’: meaning and origin
1762—(especially of an ancient style of writing): having alternate lines written from left to right and from right to left—from the Greek adverb ‘βουστροφηδόν’, meaning literally ‘as an ox turns (in ploughing)’, with allusion to the course of the plough in successive furrows
Read More‘bottle show’, ‘bottle episode’: meaning and origin
USA—‘bottle show’ 1976—‘bottle episode’ 2003—an inexpensively produced episode of a television series that is written so that it requires only one set or scene and a limited number of cast members—may refer to the constrained nature of such episodes, or to pulling a genie out of a bottle
Read More‘the (little) man in the boat’: meaning and origin
UK, 1896—the clitoris—likens the clitoris, placed between the inner labia of the vulva, to a person in a boat
Read More‘man from Mars’: meaning and origin
USA, 1892—a hypothetical observer of human behaviour and society whose perspective would be entirely detached and objective—fictitious prose narratives told of visits either from, or to, Mars, and had for common theme that we are far behind Mars in discoveries in the material and spiritual worlds
Read More‘a memory like a sieve’: meanings and origin
17th century—contrasts what the mind remembers with what it forgets (with reference to the opposition between the coarser particles, which are retained by a sieve, and the finer ones, which pass through it)—denotes an extremely poor memory (with reference to the fact that a sieve does not hold all its contents)
Read More
word histories 