“ad fontes!”
a representation of the letter A in scarlet cloth which Hester Prynne is condemned to wear in The Scarlet Letter (1850), by Nathaniel Hawthorne—soon came to be used figuratively in the sense of a stigma, a mark of infamy
Read MoreUK, 1918—a malediction, typically uttered as a parting shot after a quarrel—seems to have originated as one child’s threat to another—the reason the word ‘rabbit’ was chosen is unknown
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
Read MoreUK, 1890—the dated jocular exclamations ‘my giddy aunt!’, ‘my sainted aunt!’, etc., express surprise, consternation, etc.—they are extended forms of the exclamation ‘my aunt!’
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1941 in the sense ‘under the influence of alcohol’—aided by the phonetic similarity of ‘grip’ and ‘grape’, this phrase has, in the course of time, been coined on separate occasions by various persons, independently from one another
Read MoreAustralia, 1888—defined by Wilkes in A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms (1990) as “An imaginary rich uncle overseas, backing some venture in which the unwary may be persuaded to invest.”
Read MoreUK, 1835—said to a person that the speaker does not wish to see again—refers to Bath, a spa in south-western England, where one goes to take the waters
Read MoreUK, 1883—a gesture of derision made by putting one’s thumb to one’s nose and outspreading the fingers like a fan; can be intensified by joining the tip of the little finger to the thumb of the other hand, whose fingers are also outspread fanwise—the motivation for the choice of ‘Queen Anne’ is unknown
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UK, 1956, children’s slang—an act of placing both hands on a person’s wrist or arm and then twisting it to produce a burning sensation—alludes to the fiendish methods of torture attributed to the Chinese
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UK, 1987—a young man who behaves in an unpleasant or aggressive manner as a result of drinking (typically lager) excessively—lager, a pale beer, is favoured by the young as opposed to the dark, traditional bitter English beer
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word histories 