“ad fontes!”
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
Read Morealso ‘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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originally the sky-blue ribbon worn by the Knights-grand-cross of the French order of the Holy Ghost—applied by extension to other first-class distinctions
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Decided by the Académie française, the erroneous spelling ‘oignon’ (= ‘onion’) has become a symbol of prejudiced people, ignorant of the history of their own language.
Read Moreultimately based on the fable of the mice, or rats, who proposed to hang a bell round the cat’s neck, so as to be warned of its approach
Read More‘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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some characteristic slang creations of the British, U.S. and French soldiers during World War One, as recorded in ‘Trench Talk’, published in Everybody’s Magazine (New York) of January 1918
Read Moresupposedly an allusion to the preparation of fabric to be worked on: once the shapes have been cut out, the tailor still has a lot of sewing to do
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phonetic reduction of ‘Christ’s cross’; first element phonetically reduced as in ‘Christmas’; hence ‘criss-cross’ treated as a reduplication of ‘cross’
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Opportunity was represented as woman completely bald except for a forelock: she can only be seized as she runs towards someone, not be caught thereafter.
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