‘bone idle’: meaning and origin
Scotland, 1825 (as ‘bane idle’)—England, 1839—utterly lazy or indolent—‘bone’ seems to be used as an intensifier with adverbial force in the sense ‘through to the bone’, i.e., ‘deeply and fundamentally’
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‘Manhattanhenge’: meaning and origin
a phenomenon in which the sun rises or sets in alignment with the streets that run east to west on the street grid of Manhattan, a borough of New York City—from ‘Manhattan’ and ‘-henge’, in ‘Stonehenge’, the name of a megalithic monument in England—coined by U.S. astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
Read More‘punkie (lantern)’ | ‘punkie night’
Somerset, England, 1931—‘punkie (lantern)’: a lantern made by setting a candle in a hollowed-out mangel-wurzel—‘punkie night’: a night, in late October, on which punkies are paraded—‘punkie’: perhaps an alteration of ‘pumpkin’
Read More‘bang went sixpence’: origin and early occurrences
UK, 1870—based on the stereotype of Scots being miserly—from the story of the Scotsman who complained that he had to spend, in London, the small sum of sixpence
Read Morea Scots phrase: ‘who stole your scone?’
1928—addressed to someone who looks glum—‘scone’ (originally Scots, early 16th century) denotes a light plain doughy cake
Read More‘Coggeshall job’: meaning and origin
any muddle-headed business—UK, 1813—the stupidity of the people of Coggeshall, a small town in Essex, England, has been proverbial since the mid-17th century
Read More‘God bless the Duke of Argyll’: meaning and origin
UK, 1825—the Scots, allegedly verminous, were said to rub themselves against posts erected by the Duke of Argyll and to bless the Duke when doing so
Read Moremeanings and origin of the British phrase ‘gin and Jaguar’
1963—refers to the wealthy English middle-class people, characterised as drinking gin and driving luxury cars such as Jaguars, and to the areas where they live
Read MoreBritish phrases based on the image of being ‘on toast’
with allusion to food served up on a slice of toast—1877 ‘to have someone on toast’: to have someone at one’s mercy—1886 ‘to be had on toast’: to be cheated
Read Morea Briticism: ‘Gavin and Stacey’ used as an attributive modifier
2019—used to mean ‘Anglo-Welsh’—from ‘Gavin & Stacey’, a sitcom about the relationship between an Englishman and a Welsh woman
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