“ad fontes!”
to calm down and relax—a blend of ‘chill’ (to calm down and relax) and ‘relax’—however, explained in 1992 as a blend of ‘chill’ (to calm down and relax) and ‘max’ (to lounge, i.e., to lie, sit or stand in a relaxed or lazy way)
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On the pattern of phrases such as ‘nom de guerre’, ‘nom de théâtre’ and ‘nom de plume’, ‘nom de —’ is used, often humorously, to form phrases denoting a pseudonym, an alternative name.
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USA, 1974—to wear no underpants—originated in university slang—perhaps because commandos wear no underpants in order to prevent crotch rot and rashes
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USA, 2005—coined by Mike Masnick on Techdirt.com—refers to Barbra Streisand’s counterproductive attempt in 2003 to ban a photo of her house
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‘eggcorn’: alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements as a similar-sounding word—coined in 2003 on the website Language Log with reference to a misinterpretation of ‘acorn’ as ‘eggcorn’
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early 21st century—acronym from ‘Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’, with punning allusion to ‘capture’ and ‘gotcha’
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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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‘Grauniad’, the nickname for the Guardian, was reportedly given to this British newspaper by the magazine Private Eye because of its typesetting errors.
Read MoreThe exclamation OMG expresses astonishment, excitement, embarrassment, etc. It is from the initial letters of oh my God (the final element may sometimes represent gosh or goodness). This initialism is older than the Internet or even the Usenet (an early computer network established in 1980), since it is first found in a letter that the […]
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word histories 