also ‘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)
used 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
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
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.”
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
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
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.
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 […]