“ad fontes!”
used 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’)
Read More1951—with pun on the noun ‘camp’ (i.e.: encampment): extremely camp (i.e.: ostentatiously and extravagantly effeminate; deliberately exaggerated and theatrical in style)
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theatre—a typical entrance or exit line given to a young man in a superficial drawing-room comedy—USA 1934—but 1908 in a short story evoking the pastimes of members of the leisured class during a stay at a country house
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used in 1939 by Leo Rosten about U.S. actor W. C. Fields—has been wrongly attributed to the latter—but first used by U.S. journalist Byron Darnton, according to an article of 1937
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U.S. underworld phrase, 1931—The image is of a man whose hat is only a six-incher, but who needs a fifty-inch chest measurement in shirts.
Read Moreuncontrollable or obsessive passion—French phrase introduced in the 1960s as a theme of drama, prose narrative and cinema
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a deliberate malapropism punning on ‘I resent that remark’—USA, 1940
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U.S. slang, 2005—a gesture consisting in placing one hand on top of the other and wiggling the thumbs, made to reduce embarrassment
Read MoreUSA, 1938—male-chauvinistic phrase meaning that the place of women is in the home and that their role is to bear children—also ‘pregnant and barefoot(ed)’
Read Morea person regarded as good-natured but also not ‘bright’ intellectually—UK, 1981—Australia, 1982—USA, 1986
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