‘more — than someone has had hot dinners’

3rd Mar 2018.Reading time 5 minutes.

UK, 1937, colloquial—‘to have done something more than oneself (or someone else) has had hot dinners’: used jocularly to emphasise the subject’s wide experience of a particular activity or phenomenon

a word invented by Jonathan Swift: ‘yahoo’

2nd Mar 2018.Reading time 7 minutes.

‘yahoo’: rude, noisy or violent person—word invented by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) as the name of a race of brutish creatures resembling men in Gulliver’s Travels (1726)—came to be applied to the orang-utan

‘take the Fifth’: decline to reveal one’s own secrets

1st Mar 2018.Reading time 6 minutes.

‘to take the Fifth’: to decline to reveal one’s own secrets—from ‘to take the Fifth Amendment’: to appeal to Article V of the original amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which states that “No person […] shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.”

origin of the Australian phrase ‘Sydney or the bush’

28th Feb 2018.Reading time 3 minutes.

‘Sydney or the bush’: all or nothing (1902)—based on the metaphorical opposition between an easy life in the city and a hard life working in the outback, this phrase was apparently originally used by people risking all on the toss of a coin.

origin of ‘pub crawl’: political propaganda

27th Feb 2018.Reading time 8 minutes.

British English: a drinking tour of a number of pubs or bars—but first appeared in 1909 with specific reference to an organised form of propaganda consisting in sending a person from pub to pub in order to promote the Conservative cause

‘six of one and half a dozen of the other’

26th Feb 2018.Reading time 5 minutes.

denotes a situation in which the alternatives are considered equivalent—first recorded, as ‘six of the one and half a dozen of the other’, on 24th April 1790 in the journal of Ralph Clark, a British naval officer—synonym: ‘(as) broad as long’

‘to plough one’s own furrow’ – ‘creuser son sillon’

25th Feb 2018.Reading time 6 minutes.

‘to plough a lonely furrow’, or ‘one’s own furrow’ (UK, 1901): to carry on without help, support or companionship—French ‘creuser son sillon’ (‘to dig one’s own furrow’, first used by Voltaire): to carry out with courage and perseverance the task undertaken

A dunce was originally a follower of John Duns Scotus.

24th Feb 2018.Reading time 10 minutes.

‘dunce’: originally a follower of John Duns Scotus (circa 1265-1308), scholastic theologian; in the 16th century, Scotus’s system was attacked with ridicule by the humanists and the reformers as a farrago of needless entities and useless distinctions

origin of the pub-name ‘the Swan with Two Necks’

23rd Feb 2018.Reading time 8 minutes.

Alteration of ‘the Swan with Two Nicks’—All the Thames swans belong to the Crown, the Vintners’ Company or the Dyers’ Company. A swan with two nicks belongs to the Vintners’ Company, with one nick to the Dyers’ Company, with no nicks to the Crown.

the cultural background to ‘the Swan of Avon’

22nd Feb 2018.Reading time 8 minutes.

an epithet for William Shakespeare, born at Stratford-upon-Avon, on the River Avon—first used by Ben Jonson in the earliest collected edition (1623) of Shakespeare’s plays—but this use of ‘swan’ for a bard, a poet, is rooted in a tradition going back to antiquity