a Shakespearean phrase: ‘this mortal coil’
the troubles and activities of the world—literary or humorous, from Hamlet’s speech “to be or not be”—‘coil’: probably from Middle French ‘acueil’, encounter
Read MoreTag: dictionaries
the meaning of ‘wuthering’ in ‘Wuthering Heights’
In the name of the farmhouse, ‘wuthering’ is a “provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.”
Read More‘To sell down the river’ originated in the history of American slavery.
This phrase originated in the history of American slavery: the river was the Mississippi and down implied the transfer of slaves from north to south.
Read Moreorigin of ‘a baker’s dozen’ and ‘thirteen to the dozen’
from the bakers’ former practice of adding a loaf to a dozen, either as a safeguard against accusations of giving light weight or as the retailer’s profit
Read Moreorigin of ‘to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face’
history (and Latin and French equivalents) of ‘to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face’ (to carry out a vengeful action that hurts oneself more than another)
Read Moreorigin of ‘the world is my oyster’
refers to the possibility of finding a pearl in an oyster—coined by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor, perhaps in allusion to a proverb
Read Moresexual origin of ‘merrythought’ (‘wishbone’)
‘merrythought’, late 16th century— the forked bone between the neck and breast of a bird—so called from its resemblance to a woman’s external genitals
Read More‘no man’s land’ and three different types of death
‘no man’s land’—first a place of execution outside London; then a mass burial ground during the Black Death; later an unoccupied zone between opposing forces
Read Morethe long history of the word ‘blues’
‘blues’—from ‘blue’ (‘sorrowful’) and elliptically from ‘blue devils’ (‘depression’)—originally a metaphorical use of ‘blue’ (‘bruised’), as in ‘black and blue’
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘something nasty in the woodshed’
UK, 1930s—from Cold Comfort Farm (1932), by Stella Gibbons, in which a character exploits a traumatic childhood experience to exert control over her family
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word histories 