“ad fontes!”
title of a CBS television documentary first broadcast in 1966—came to be used derogatorily of any fast package-tour—gave rise to the pattern ‘(if) it’s Tuesday, this (or it) must be ——’, used of travel anywhere
Read More1979—nickname given, in particular, to singer Olivia Newton-John—alludes to the type of popular music that (like a milkshake) is discarded as soon as it has been consumed
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USA, 1956—where the important facts or realities lie; where theory is put into practice—originated in the jargon of the advertising business, in which ‘let’s get down (to) where the rubber meets the road’ meant ‘how much is it going to cost?’
Read Moredenotes effrontery—‘front’ denotes self-assurance, but the word that follows ‘than’ puns on ‘front’ in the sense of the façade of a building, a long seafront, etc.—also denotes a well-endowed woman, with reference to ‘front’ in the sense of a woman’s bust
Read More‘nothingburger’: a person or thing of no importance, value or substance—‘mouseburger’: a young woman of unexceptional appearance and talents, regarded as timid, dowdy or mousy—from the use of ‘burger’ as the second element in compounds denoting types of hamburger
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Australia, 1938—beset with extraordinary difficulties—refers to Speed Gordon, the Australian name of Flash Gordon, the hero of the eponymous space-opera comic strip first published in 1934
Read MoreUSA, 1975—to be naive, ignorant or gullible—the image is of a country person who has just arrived in town on a turnip truck
Read MoreUSA, 1939 in The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck—a piece of homespun philosophy meaning that a man must do what he feels needs to be done, even if it is dangerous or undesirable
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conveys derisive self-congratulation for an action that the speaker has done from a sense of duty rather than for pleasure—from a line uttered by Charles Laughton in the 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII
Read Moreused to rebuke an unrealistic conditional—USA, 1808: ‘if my aunt had been my uncle, what would have been her gender?’—France, 1843: ‘si ma tante était un homme, ça serait mon oncle’ (‘if my aunt were a man, that would be my uncle’)
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word histories 