a word invented by Jonathan Swift: ‘yahoo’

2nd March 2018.Reading time 7 minutes.

‘yahoo’: rude, noisy or violent person—word invented by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) as the name of a race of brutish creatures resembling men in Gulliver’s Travels (1726)—came to be applied to the orang-utan

origin of ‘in petto’ (‘in the secret of the mind or heart’)

17th February 2018.Reading time 9 minutes.

Italian 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

original sense of ‘chop and change’: ‘barter and exchange’

8th January 2018.Reading time 7 minutes.

The phrase to chop and change means to change one’s opinions or behaviour repeatedly and abruptly. Here, chop originally meant to barter, and change meant to make an exchange with; in other words, this was an alliterative repetitive expression, the two verbs having roughly the same meaning (cf. also, for example, the alliterative phrase to be part and […]

How ‘Grub Street’ came to refer to hack work.

23rd December 2017.Reading time 8 minutes.

From the 17th century onwards, Grub Street, in Moorgate, London, was inhabited by literary hacks.

Why ‘ache’ ought to be written ‘ake’.

29th October 2017.Reading time 8 minutes.

The spelling ‘ache’ (erroneously derived from Greek ‘ákhos’) instead of ‘ake’ is largely due to Samuel Johnson in A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).

meaning and origin of ‘a little bird told me’

24th October 2017.Reading time 6 minutes.

1711 in a letter by Jonathan Swift—perhaps from Ecclesiastes, 10:20: “a bird of the air shall carry the voice; and that which hath wings, shall tell the matter”

meaning and origin of ‘spick and span’

19th October 2017.Reading time 5 minutes.

mid-17th cent. in the sense ‘brand new’—from ‘spick and span new’, extension of ‘span new’, from Old Norse ‘spán-nýr’, ‘as new as a freshly cut wooden chip’

the origin of ‘spud’ (potato)

29th September 2017.Reading time 5 minutes.

The noun ‘spud’, originally the name for the digging implement used to dig up potatoes, was applied to the latter in the 19th century.

the authentic origin of ‘the devil to pay’

28th September 2017.Reading time 13 minutes.

refers to a person making a pact with the Devil: the heavy price has to be paid in the end—unrelated to the nautical phrase ‘the devil to pay and no pitch hot’

origin of the phrase ‘the land of Nod’

7th September 2017.Reading time 5 minutes.

‘the land of Nod’: a state of sleep—punning allusion to the name of the region to which Cain went after he had killed his brother Abel (Genesis, 4:16)