“ad fontes!”
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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
Read More
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
Read More
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
Read More
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’.
Read More
UK, 1707—‘to take the (King’s/Queen’s) shilling’: to sign up as a soldier, from the former practice of giving a shilling to a recruit when he enlisted
Read More
word histories 