“ad fontes!”
to take away from one person, cause, etc., in order to pay or confer something on another; to discharge one debt by incurring another—late 14th century—from the association of ‘Peter’ and ‘Paul’, the names of two leading apostles and saints, and fellow martyrs at Rome
Read Morechurchyard—from German ‘Gottesacker’, literally ‘God’s field’—image of the bodies of the dead sown like seeds in order to bear fruit at the time of resurrection
Read Moreattested in the Later Version (1395) of the Wycliffe Bible—‘ghost’ means ‘the soul or spirit, as the principle of life’
Read Morefrom Job, 19:20—this verse, and particularly the Hebrew verb form immediately preceding ‘bĕʿōr šinnāi’ (‘with the skin of my teeth’), are of uncertain meaning
Read More‘every tiny detail’—from Matthew, 5:18—‘jot’, from ‘iōta’, the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet—‘tittle’, a small mark used in writing or printing
Read Morefrom the legal formula ‘part and parcel’, in which both nouns meant ‘an integral portion of something’, the second noun merely reinforcing the first
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first recorded in ‘Hudibras’ (1664), by Samuel Butler—from the first half of ‘Proverbs’, 13:24: “Whoever spares the rod hates their children.”
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late Middle English—early form of ‘Bethlehem’, originally referring to the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem in London, used as an institution for the insane
Read Morefrom the gospel of Matthew, 18:6: If someone causes a child to sin, it would be better for them to have a millstone hung around their neck and be drowned in the sea.
Read More‘The straight and narrow’: allusion to the Sermon on the Mount. ‘Straight’ is an alteration of ‘strait’, meaning ‘so narrow as to make transit difficult’.
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