‘General Winter’: meaning and origin
personifies 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
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‘in clover’: meaning and origin of this phrase
UK, 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 More‘(from) soup to nuts’: meanings and origin
USA, 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
Read Morethe long history of the phrase ‘blood, sweat, and tears’
current use seems to allude to a speech by Winston Churchill in May 1940—but the metaphor goes back to the early 17th century
Read Moreorigin of the catchphrase ‘Alas! my poor brother’
from an advertisement for the concentrated beef extract Bovril, showing a bullock lamenting over a jar of the product
Read Morethe cultural background to ‘the Swan of Avon’
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
Read Moreorigin of ‘quiz’ (“Vir bonus est quis?”)?
Originally meaning ‘person of ridiculous appearance’, ‘quiz’ (students’ slang, late 18th century) was jocularly derived from the Latin interrogative pronoun ‘quis’ in “Vir bonus est quis?” (“Who is a good man?”)—a good, ingenuous, harmless man being likely to become an object of ridicule or even of harassment.
Read Moreorigin of ‘one swallow does not make a summer’
MEANING a single fortunate event doesn’t mean that what follows will also be good ORIGIN The annual migration of swallows to Europe from southern climes at the end of winter was the subject of a proverb in Ancient Greece: μία χελιδὼν ἔαρ οὐ ποιεῖ, in which ἔαρ means spring; it is found […]
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘to beggar belief’
MEANING The phrase to beggar belief (or description) means to be too extraordinary to be believed (or described). ORIGIN The literal meaning of the verb to beggar is to make a beggar of, exhaust the means of, reduce to beggary. It came to be used figuratively to mean to exhaust the resources […]
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