meaning and origin of ‘Dutch auction’
UK, 1788—denotes an auction in which the price is lowered by stages until a buyer is found—said to have been invented by the Dutch specifically as the best solution to selling tulip bulbs
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origin of ‘Brownie’ (Girl Scout or Girl Guide)
1916—from ‘brownie’, i.e. a benevolent elf that supposedly haunts houses and does housework secretly—not from the fact that the uniform of the junior Girl Scouts and Girl Guides is brown
Read Morethe shadowy history of the word ‘silhouette’
1763 in French, 1798 in English—from the name of Étienne de Silhouette (1709-67), Controller-General of Finances in 1759—perhaps because he might have invented the portrait in profile obtained by tracing the outline of a head or figure by means of its shadow
Read Morethe history of ‘burnsides’, ‘sideburns’ and ‘sideboards’
After Ambrose Burnside, Union general in the U.S. Civil War, ‘burnsides’ (1866) denotes thick side whiskers worn with a moustache and clean-shaven chin; on the pattern of ‘side whiskers’, it was altered to ‘sideburns’ (1875), itself altered to ‘sideboards’ (1882).
Read Moreorigin of ‘coward’ and of ‘cowardy, cowardy custard’
‘coward’—from Old-French ‘cuard’, probably referring to a frightened animal with its tail between its legs—from ‘cüe’ (Modern French ‘queue’), ‘tail’, and pejorative suffix ‘-ard’ (cf. ‘bastard’)—‘cowardy, cowardy custard’, alliterative nonsensical children’s phrase (19th century)
Read More‘to use one’s loaf’ (‘to use one’s common sense’)
First recorded in The Leeds Mercury (Leeds, Yorkshire) of Friday 26 August 1938, the phrase ‘to use one’s loaf’ means ‘to use one’s common sense’. Here, ‘loaf’, a shortening of ‘loaf of bread’, is rhyming slang for ‘head’.
Read Moreorigin of ‘lock, stock and barrel’ (i.e., ‘completely’)
USA, 1811—based on the three principal components that make up a flintlock gun: ‘lock’ denotes the firing mechanism, ‘stock’ the handle or wooden shoulder-piece to which it is attached, and ‘barrel’ the tube down which the bullet is fired
Read More‘preposterous’, or ‘having first what should be coming after’
16th century—from the Latin adjective ‘praeposterus’, composed of the adverb ‘prae’ (‘in front’, ‘before’) and the adjective ‘posterus’ (‘coming after’, ‘following’, ‘next’), so that its literal sense is ‘next (placed) first’, ‘having first what should be coming after’.
Read More“the very pineapple of politeness” and other malapropisms
from the name of Mrs Malaprop, a character who confuses long words in The Rivals (1775), a comedy by the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan—character named after ‘malapropos’, from the French locution ‘mal à propos’, literally ‘ill to purpose’
Read More“wedding vowels”, “tongue and cheek” and other eggcorns
‘eggcorn’: alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements as a similar-sounding word—coined in 2003 on the website Language Log with reference to a misinterpretation of ‘acorn’ as ‘eggcorn’
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