How Trenet’s ‘Douce France’ became a manifesto for equality of rights.
‘Douce France’: a song composed by Charles Trenet during WWII; covered in 1986 by the French band Carte de Séjour as a manifesto for equality of rights
Read MoreTag: discriminations
the emergence of ‘boycott’ in The Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, in 1880
from the name of Captain Charles C. Boycott, land agent in Ireland, who was ostracised for refusing to reduce rents during the Land League agitation in 1880
Read Moreorigin of ‘Froggy’ (French)
mid-19th cent.—perhaps from a specific application of the general term of abuse ‘Frog’, aided by the shared initial consonant cluster in ‘French’ and ‘frog’
Read Moreorigin of ‘moonraker’
moonraker: a native of Wiltshire; from the tale that some of them mistook the reflection of the moon in a pond for a cheese and tried to rake it out.
Read Moreto send to Coventry
probable origin: in 1642, during the English Civil War, Royalists had been captured at Birmingham and sent to Coventry, which was a Parliamentarian stronghold.
Read MoreKindertransport
Kindertransport (from German ‘Kinder’, children): operation from 1938 to 1940 to evacuate (mostly Jewish) children from Nazi-controlled areas of Europe to the UK
Read MoreYorkshire tyke
The word ‘tyke’, a nickname for a person from Yorkshire, originally meant ‘mongrel’. The people from Yorkshire have adopted it as a term of self-reference.
Read Morecontredanse
plate 19: La Trénis, Contredanse source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque Nationale de France from the 1931 reprint of the caricatures published under the title of Le Bon Genre (1827 edition), including Observations sur les modes et les usages de Paris; the following comment about La Trénis accompanies this plate: (Année 1805.) Cette danse porte le […]
Read MoreGalloglossia
John Bull taking a Luncheon:—or—British Cooks, cramming Old Grumble-Gizzard, with Bonne-Chère. hand-coloured etching by James Gillray, published on 24th October 1798 — © Trustees of the British Museum This print was published just after Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile. He is shown in the forefront of British admirals and naval heroes, serving up […]
Read Moreorigin of ‘quiz’
Originally students’ slang, ‘quiz’ is from Latin ‘quis’, meaning ‘who’, as used by the Roman poet Horace in “vir bonus est quis?”, “who is a good man?”
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