“ad fontes!”
very boring or unexciting—‘(as) dull as ditchwater’ (1770)—the later phrase ‘(as) dull as dishwater’ (1832) is probably due to mispronunciation of ‘ditchwater’ in the original phrase
Read Moreenjoyment or pleasure shared by a large number of people—coined by Samuel Johnson in his posthumous homage to David Garrick published in Prefaces, biographical and critical, to the works of the English poets (London, 1779)
Read Morealso ‘more than meets the ear’—meaning: more significance or complexity than is at first apparent—first used by John Milton as ‘more is meant than meets the ear’ in Il Penseroso (1645)
Read Moreused of something impossible to obtain or achieve—1796—the image is of an illusory quest for the treasure supposed to lie where the rainbow appears to touch the ground
Read Morepersonifies the winter season as an army commander, especially in reference to winter as detrimental or destructive to a military campaign—UK, 1777, in reference to the War of American Independence
Read MoreUK, 1710—in ease and luxury—refers to the use of clover as fodder, as explained by Samuel Johnson in A Dictionary of the English Language (1755): “To live in Clover, is to live luxuriously; clover being extremely delicious and fattening to cattle.”
Read MoreUSA, 1876: from beginning to end, completely, exhaustively—literal meaning, 1852: all the successive parts of a meal, from soup at the beginning to nuts at the end
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current use seems to allude to a speech by Winston Churchill in May 1940—but the metaphor goes back to the early 17th century
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from an advertisement for the concentrated beef extract Bovril, showing a bullock lamenting over a jar of the product
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an epithet for William Shakespeare, born at Stratford-upon-Avon, on the River Avon—first used by Ben Jonson in the earliest collected edition (1623) of Shakespeare’s plays—but this use of ‘swan’ for a bard, a poet, is rooted in a tradition going back to antiquity
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word histories 