“ad fontes!”
to put someone in a difficult, vulnerable or compromising situation, especially by exposing them to blame—USA, 1945, sports—the image is of suspending wet washing in the open so that it can dry
Read MoreUK, 1944—the slogan of the Boy Scout Association’s effort to raise money for funds by doing jobs, originally at a shilling a time
Read MoreUK, 2019—an older, white, working-class, Brexiteer, Northern-English man—coined by thinktank Onward to designate the Conservative Party’s target voter in the 2019 general election—refers to Workington, in Cumbria
Read MoreUK slang—expresses exasperation at a situation or course of action—military, 1941—what ‘game of soldiers’ refers to is unclear
Read MoreUK, 1954—the economic policy of Rab Butler, Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer (1951-5), regarded as largely indistinguishable from that of Hugh Gaitskell, Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer (1950-1)—blend of ‘Butler’ and ‘Gaitskell’ plus suffix ‘-ism’
Read MoreBritish, colloquial: a period during which an employee who is about to leave a company continues to receive a salary and in return agrees not to work for anyone else—origin, British Army: a paid leave between the end of one posting and the beginning of another
Read MoreIn French, the concept of dependency underlies the semantic distribution of some basic lexical items: the female is strictly defined in her relation of dependency to the male, as a daughter or as a spouse.
Read Morealso ‘to drop one’s h’s’—not to pronounce the letter h at the beginning of words in which it is pronounced in standard English—1855—1847 as ‘not to sound one’s h’s’
Read Morea gesture (made by a French person to deny responsibility, knowledge or agreement) consisting typically in shrugging one’s shoulders while upturning one’s hands
Read Moreto discuss an essentially private matter, especially a dispute or scandal, in public—UK, 1819—loan translation from French ‘laver son linge sale en public’, originated by Napoléon Bonaparte in 1814
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word histories 