“ad fontes!”
an occasion on which enjoyment or profit is derived from the suffering or discomfiture of others—UK, 1836—alludes to the description of a gladiator dying in a Roman arena in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), by Byron
Read More1793—probably ultimately after post-classical Latin ‘mille viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam…’ (‘a thousand roads lead for ever to Rome the men…’)—the metaphor occurred in A Treatise on the Astrolabe (ca 1391), by Geoffrey Chaucer
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classical Latin ‘mare nostrum’, literally ‘our sea’: one of the names given by the Romans to the Mediterranean Sea—USA, 1824: any sea or other stretch of water belonging to, or under the control of, a nation
Read MoreUK, 1864: a naive person who can be manipulated to advance a political agenda—USA, 1948 (1946 as ‘useful innocent’): with reference to a communist strategy designed to gain political power
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the nickname that the Venetian opera audience gave to Joan Sutherland when she sang Handel’s Alcina at the Fenice Theatre on 21 February 1960—Italian ‘è stupenda’ translates as ‘she is stupendous’
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a means of enforcing conformity—Greek mythology: Procrustes was a robber who made his victims fit a bed by either stretching them longer or cutting them shorter
Read MoreUK, 1934—image said to have been first used by Lenin about the Russian soldiers who were abandoning the war during the Russian Revolution of 1917
Read MoreThe phrase ‘a far cry’ means ‘something very different’. Its literal signification (first recorded in A Legend of Montrose (1819), by Walter Scott) is ‘a long way’, ‘a great distance’. Here, the noun ‘cry’ denotes ‘a calling distance’, as in ‘within cry of’, meaning ‘within calling distance of’.
Read MoreItalian translation of Latin ‘in pectore’ (‘in the breast’, ‘in the secret of the heart’)—when a pope announces that he has appointed a cardinal whom he reserves ‘in petto’, it means that he will reveal this cardinal’s name later
Read MoreThe noun red tape, meaning excessive bureaucracy or adherence to official rules and formalities, refers to the use of woven red tape to tie up bundles of legal documents and official papers; the literal meaning is first recorded in 1658, the figurative meaning in 1736.
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word histories 