‘please the pigs’: meaning and early occurrences
meaning: if circumstances permit, if all is well—first recorded in 1683—of unknown origin
Read MoreTag: James Joyce
‘segocia’: meaning and origin
a 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’)
Read More‘Adam and Eve’ (to believe)
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’)
Read More‘Bloomsday’: meanings and origin
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 More‘to put [something] where the monkey put(s) the nuts’
UK—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
Read More‘thank your mother for the rabbit(s)’: meanings and early occurrences
UK and Ireland, since 1913—this jocular phrase has been used as an ironic expression of gratitude and as a goodbye
Read Moreorigin of the Irish-English phrase ‘up the pole’ (‘pregnant’)
probably refers to pregnancy as an awkward condition, the image being apparently of an uncomfortable position at the top of a pole
Read Morethe cultural background to ‘the Swan of Avon’
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
Read MoreHow Horace Walpole coined ‘serendipity’.
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 […]
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘Hogs Norton’
The name Hogs Norton, also Hog’s Norton and Hogsnorton, denotes a fictional town renowned for its uncultured and boorish inhabitants. It has often been used in depreciative phrases suggesting that someone is a native or inhabitant of this town. These phrases have variously associated the name: – with present-day Hook Norton, a town in Oxfordshire […]
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