“ad fontes!”
a container used to store for posterity a selection of objects thought to be representative of a particular moment in time—USA, 1938—coined to specifically designate the container built by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company for the 1939 New York World’s Fair
Read Moremeaning: if circumstances permit, if all is well—first recorded in 1683—of unknown origin
Read Morea pal, a mate, a good friend—Ireland, 1917—perhaps an anglicised form of Irish ‘Seo Dhuitse’ (‘Here you are’) or perhaps an anglicised form of French ‘Mon cher gosse’ (‘My dear child’)
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UK, 1925—the verb ‘Adam and Eve’ is rhyming slang for ‘to believe’—there is no truncation, contrary to the usual rhyming-slang formation (cf. ‘scooby’, rhyming slang for ‘clue’, which is short for ‘Scooby Doo’)
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the 16th of June 1904; also the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, especially in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Ulysses (1922), by the Irish author James Joyce—Leopold Bloom is one of the central characters in Ulysses, in which all the action takes place on one day, the 16th of June 1904
Read MoreUK—1879 “where the monkey put the shells”—1892 “where the monkey put the nuts”—with reference to the anus, this slang phrase expresses contemptuous rejection
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UK and Ireland, since 1913—this jocular phrase has been used as an ironic expression of gratitude and as a goodbye
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probably refers to pregnancy as an awkward condition, the image being apparently of an uncomfortable position at the top of a pole
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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
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The noun serendipity denotes the faculty of making by accident discoveries that are both fortunate and unexpected. (It has been borrowed into Spanish as serendipia, into Italian as serendipità, and into French as sérendipité.) It was coined by the English writer and politician Horace Walpole (1717-97). In a letter that he wrote to his friend Horace Mann […]
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