“ad fontes!”
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
Read MoreThe 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 […]
Read MoreFrom the 17th century onwards, Grub Street, in Moorgate, London, was inhabited by literary hacks.
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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).
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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”
Read Moremid-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’
Read MoreThe noun ‘spud’, originally the name for the digging implement used to dig up potatoes, was applied to the latter in the 19th century.
Read Morerefers 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’
Read More‘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)
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‘by a long chalk’: in a great degree, by far — 19th century, from the practice of using chalk to mark up the points scored in a game
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