‘damsel in distress’: meaning and early occurrences
the clichéd literary topos of a young woman who is in trouble and needs a man’s help—1694, in a text by Joseph Addison
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origin of ‘to take time by the forelock’
Opportunity was represented as woman completely bald except for a forelock: she can only be seized as she runs towards someone, not be caught thereafter.
Read Morea 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
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word histories 