“ad fontes!”
For a limited edition of his book ‘Are You a Bromide?’ sent to the guests of the 1907 annual dinner of the American Booksellers’ Association, Gelett Burgess devised a jacket showing a young lady whom he facetiously dubbed Miss Belinda Blurb.
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Of American-English origin, the slang term fat cat denotes a wealthy, influential person, especially one who is a heavy contributor to a political party or campaign. The earliest occurrence that I have found is from an article published in The Sun (Baltimore, Maryland) of 1 November 1925.
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The verb ‘elope’ now means ‘to run away secretly in order to get married’, but it originated in Anglo-Norman as a legal term meaning, of a wife, ‘to run away from her husband with a paramour’.
Read MoreThe original meaning of beer o’clock is 5 p.m. as the end of the working day. Its first known user was Stephen King (born 1947), American author of novels of horror and suspense.
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UK, 1972—‘XXXX’: a euphemistic substitute for a four-letter swear word, usually ‘fuck’—it did not originally refer to the Australian lager Castlemaine XXXX
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an argument said to have been used by John Morton in levying forced loans: a person living well was obviously rich; one living frugally must have savings
Read Morefrom the legal formula ‘part and parcel’, in which both nouns meant ‘an integral portion of something’, the second noun merely reinforcing the first
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UK, 1784—elaborated on the archaic ‘on the spur’, which meant ‘in great haste’ and referred to the use of spurs to urge a horse forward
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The spelling ‘ache’ (erroneously derived from Greek ‘ákhos’) instead of ‘ake’ is largely due to Samuel Johnson in A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).
Read MoreWith words denoting some specified deficiency in a desirable or standard quantity of something, ‘short of a ——’ means ‘mentally deficient’, ‘slightly crazy’.
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word histories 