a Northern-English word: ‘mardy’
‘mardy’: ‘sulky’, ‘moody’—from ‘mard’, dialectal alteration of ‘marred’, meaning, of a child, ‘spoilt’, and the suffix ‘-y’, meaning ‘having the qualities of’
Read MoreTag: folk etymology
everything but the kitchen sink
The phrase ‘everything but the kitchen sink’, or ‘the kitchen stove’, and variants mean ‘practically everything imaginable’—origin: USA, early 20th century
Read Morea curious case of misunderstanding in the Oxford English Dictionary
‘Wash the milk off your liver’: refers to the digestibility of milk, but misunderstood by the Oxford English Dictionary as referring to cowardice
Read Moreorigin of ‘a millstone round someone’s neck’
from the gospel of Matthew, 18:6: If someone causes a child to sin, it would be better for them to have a millstone hung around their neck and be drowned in the sea.
Read Moreorigin of ‘to turn a blind eye’
early 19th century—shortening of ‘to turn the deaf ear and the blind eye’ and variants
Read Morea nod is as good as a wink
‘a nod’s as good as a wink (to a blind horse)’ 18th century—acknowledges that a hint or suggestion has been understood without the need of further elaboration
Read Moreorigin of ‘all my eye and Betty Martin’
second half of the 18th century—a mere fanciful extension of ‘all my eye’—maintained in a sort of artificial life by persistent conjectures about its origin
Read Moreorigin of ‘to bite the bullet’
late 19th century—from the practice consisting, for a soldier, in biting on a bullet when being flogged
Read Moreto set the Thames on fire
from the image of an impossible task, ‘to set the Thames on fire’: to work wonders — typically used negatively in the ironic sense never to distinguish oneself
Read Moreorigin of ‘once in a blue moon’
‘Once in a blue moon’ is a development from ‘once in a moon’, meaning ‘once a month’, hence ‘occasionally’—‘blue’ is merely a meaningless fanciful intensive.
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