‘mauvais coucheur’: meaning and origin

a difficult, uncooperative or unsociable person—UK, 1829—from French ‘mauvais coucheur’, literally ‘bad bedfellow’, with original allusion to a person whom a traveller had to share a bed with when stopping over at an inn

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notes on ‘no joy without alloy’

also ‘no joy without annoy’—meaning: there is a trace of trouble or difficulty in every pleasure—was already a common proverb in the late sixteenth century

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How ‘magazine’ came to denote a periodical publication.

‘Magazine’ (= ‘storehouse’) came to denote a book providing information on a specified subject (17th c.). This gave rise to the sense ‘periodical magazine (= ‘repository’) of the most interesting pieces of information published in the newspapers’ (18th c.).

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