“ad fontes!”
The colloquial see you later, alligator, which originated in American English, is a catchphrase used on parting. The expected response is in, or after, a while, crocodile. —Cf. also notes on ‘see you later, agitator’. The earliest instance of see you later, alligator that I have found is from Teenagers’ Slang Expressions Are Explained by […]
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USA—‘not part of a particular exclusive group’, 1955—‘out of one’s mind’, 1958—‘smashed out of one’s skull’ (= ‘drunk’, 1963)—‘bored out of one’s skull’, 1967
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apparently misattributed to Andy Warhol in the book published for the first European retrospective of his work at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, in 1968
Read More18th century, of women’s clothes—‘bib’: a piece of cloth worn between throat and waist; ‘tucker’: a piece of lace or linen worn in or around the top of a bodice
Read Moremid-17th cent. in the sense ‘brand new’—from ‘spick and span new’, extension of ‘span new’, from Old Norse ‘spán-nýr’, ‘as new as a freshly cut wooden chip’
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UK, 1929—the attitudes, loyalties, values, etc., associated with British public schools—from the distinctive tie that indicates which school the wearer attended
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UK, 1990s—either from Romany ‘čhavo’, an unmarried Romani male, a male Romani child, or from English or Anglo-Romany ‘chavvy’, a baby, a child
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19th cent.—‘button-hold’ was probably mistaken in spoken language for a past form, hence the coinage of ‘buttonhole’ in order to match the original error
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In Psalms, the subjugated nation of Moab is compared to a vessel used for washing the feet—hence in school slang ‘Moab’: humorous for ‘washroom’, ‘tub’, ‘sink’
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US, 1883—from the craze generated by ‘Fédora’, an 1882 drama by Victorien Sardou and the name of its heroine, played in early productions by Sarah Bernhardt
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word histories 