‘to leave in the lurch’: meaning and origin
to desert someone in trouble—late 16th cent.—from French ‘lourche’, which denoted a game resembling backgammon and was used as an adjective meaning discomfited
Read More“ad fontes!”
to desert someone in trouble—late 16th cent.—from French ‘lourche’, which denoted a game resembling backgammon and was used as an adjective meaning discomfited
Read MoreOpportunity was represented as woman completely bald except for a forelock: she can only be seized as she runs towards someone, not be caught thereafter.
Read Moreearly 18th century—from the name of the Roman orator and author Marcus Tullius Cicero, apparently in allusion to the eloquence and learning of these guides
Read Moreobsession—from Dickens’s ‘David Copperfield’, in which Mr. Dick is unable to write his memoirs because of the intrusive image of King Charles the First’s head
Read Moreprobably from Latin ‘Mater Cara’ or Italian ‘Madre Cara’, ‘dear mother’, i.e. the Virgin Mary, believed by sailors to send the petrel as a harbinger of storms
Read More‘caper’: probably abbreviation of ‘cabriole’, from Italian ‘capriola’, literally ‘female roe deer’, from Latin ‘capreola’, ‘wild goat’, from ‘capra’, she-goat
Read MoreThe pig probably symbolises the unpleasant fact of sweating profusely in the same way as it often represents greed, dirt, etc. in many other derogatory idioms.
Read MoreThe word ‘slave’ is from Medieval Latin ‘Sclavus’, ‘Slav’, because the Slavic peoples were frequently reduced to a servile condition by the Germanic conquest.
Read MoreThe noun ‘paparazzo’ is from the name of a photographer in La Dolce Vita (1960) by Federico Fellini. The choice of this name has been variously explained.
Read Moreplate 19: La Trénis, Contredanse source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque Nationale de France from the 1931 reprint of the caricatures published under the title of Le Bon Genre (1827 edition), including Observations sur les modes et les usages de Paris; the following comment about La Trénis accompanies this plate: (Année 1805.) Cette danse porte le […]
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