“ad fontes!”
Of American-English origin, the slang term fat cat denotes a wealthy, influential person, especially one who is a heavy contributor to a political party or campaign. The earliest occurrence that I have found is from an article published in The Sun (Baltimore, Maryland) of 1 November 1925.
Read MoreThe noun red tape, meaning excessive bureaucracy or adherence to official rules and formalities, refers to the use of woven red tape to tie up bundles of legal documents and official papers; the literal meaning is first recorded in 1658, the figurative meaning in 1736.
Read More‘Atlantic’ originally referred to Mount Atlas in North Africa, on which the heavens were fabled to rest; it was hence applied to the sea near the western shore of Africa, and afterwards extended to the whole ocean lying between Europe and Africa on the east and America on the west.
Read MoreMany centuries before becoming a nickname for New York City and the name of a fictional city associated with the Batman stories, Gotham was used in Britain as the name of a (probably fictional) village proverbial for the folly of its inhabitants.
Read MoreThe phrase to chop and change means to change one’s opinions or behaviour repeatedly and abruptly. Here, chop originally meant to barter, and change meant to make an exchange with; in other words, this was an alliterative repetitive expression, the two verbs having roughly the same meaning (cf. also, for example, the alliterative phrase to be part and […]
Read MoreThe phrase ‘to go to pot’ means ‘to be ruined or destroyed’, ‘to go to pieces’, ‘to deteriorate through neglect’. The allusion is to the cutting up of meat into pieces ready for the cooking-pot, as several 16th-century texts make clear.
Read More‘Glamour’ was originally a Scottish alteration of ‘grammar’: this article explains how it came to denote an attractive or exciting quality that makes certain people or things seem appealing. Classical Greek γραμματική (= grammatikḗ) and classical Latin grammătĭca denoted the methodical study of literature, that is to say, philology in the widest modern sense, including textual […]
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The 1776 French translation of Laurence Sterne’s ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’ gave to French ‘dada’, a child’s noun for ‘horse’, the figurative meaning of ‘favourite pastime’ or ‘pet idea’.
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First recorded in The Bystander (London) on 24 January 1906, this French phrase means ‘hobby, pastime’; it refers to the passion that the French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) had for playing the violin.
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‘Hobby’, diminutive of ‘Hob’, pet form of ‘Robert’, was used to denote a small horse, hence a child’s toy with a horse’s head, hence a favourite occupation—cf. French ‘dada’, child’s word for horse, used to denote a favourite pastime
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