‘Job’s comforter’: meaning and origin
1673—a person who aggravates distress under the guise of administering comfort—alludes to Job’s reply to his friends in the Book of Job, 16:2
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‘Kleenex music’: meanings and origin
1962: a type of popular music that is rapidly discarded—also, 1967: Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, regarded as a lachrymose piece of music by Igor Stravinsky—‘Kleenex’: a proprietary name for a soft, disposable paper tissue
Read More‘that’s rich, coming from —’: meaning and origin
UK, 1836—that’s a surprisingly unfair criticism, considering that the person who has just made it has the same fault—here, ‘rich’ means ‘preposterous’, ‘outrageous’
Read More‘one might hear a pin drop’ | ‘one can hear a pin drop’
‘one might hear a pin drop’ (UK, 1739): the silence and sense of expectation are intense—‘one can hear a pin drop’ (UK, 1737): one has a keen sense of hearing
Read More‘usherette’: meanings and origin
USA, 1906: a female attendant who shows people to their seats in a church—USA, 1907: a female usher at Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House—from ‘usher’ and the suffix ‘-ette’, forming nouns denoting women or girls linked with, or carrying out a role indicated by, the first element
Read More‘to be economical with the truth’: meaning and origin
Ireland, 1832—particularly associated with Lord Robert Armstrong and the ‘Spycatcher’ trial (1986)—‘economy of truth’ was used in 1796 by Edmund Burke
Read More‘padre’s hour’: meaning and origin
UK, 1942—a weekly hour of religious instruction provided by chaplains to British-Army units—‘padre’ (literally ‘father’) is colloquially used to designate and address a male chaplain in the armed forces
Read More‘a blind bit of ——’: meaning and origin
UK, 1922—used in negative constructions with a following noun to mean ‘a single ——’, ‘any ——’; the nouns most commonly used in those constructions are ‘notice’ and ‘difference’
Read More‘a blessing in disguise’: meaning and origin
an apparent misfortune that works to the eventual good of the recipient—first half of the 18th century (from 1713 onwards) in the plural form ‘blessings in disguise’
Read More‘to be skating on thin ice’: meaning and origin
to court danger by behaving in an obviously risky manner that cannot be sustained for long—1841 in an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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