‘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 More‘gizza job’: a phrase of the mass-unemployment age
‘give us a job’—UK, 1983—used by Yosser Hughes, a character in Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), a BBC TV drama series on the desperation bred by unemployment
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘Poona’ as applied to army officers
UK, 1930s—the reactionary opinions and pompous manner of the army officers who had been stationed at Poona, a military and administrative centre in India
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 Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘to light the (blue) touchpaper’
UK, mid-1950s—to set a course of exciting or dramatic events in motion—refers to firework instructions such as ‘light the blue touchpaper and retire immediately’
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 Morethe birth of a British catchphrase: ‘mind my bike’
February 1940—coined by the British actor Jack Warner in ‘Garrison Theatre’, a BBC radio comedy series devised to entertain World-War-II audiences
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word histories 