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“Ad fontes!”

Tag: Edmund Spenser

origin of ‘to take time by the forelock’

1st Oct 2017.Reading time 24 minutes.

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.

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a Shakespearean phrase: ‘this mortal coil’

30th Aug 2017.Reading time 6 minutes.

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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