Why does ‘season’ mean both ‘a division of the year’ and ‘to flavour’?
‘to season’, from Old French ‘saisonner’: ‘to do something during the proper season’, hence ‘to make appropriate to the circumstances’, ‘to flavour (a dish)’
Read MoreTag: Latin
a Shakespearean phrase: ‘this mortal coil’
the troubles and activities of the world—literary or humorous, from Hamlet’s speech “to be or not be”—‘coil’: probably from Middle French ‘acueil’, encounter
Read Moreorigin of ‘to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face’
history (and Latin and French equivalents) of ‘to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face’ (to carry out a vengeful action that hurts oneself more than another)
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘something nasty in the woodshed’
UK, 1930s—from Cold Comfort Farm (1932), by Stella Gibbons, in which a character exploits a traumatic childhood experience to exert control over her family
Read Morethe making of ‘omelette’
1611—from French ‘omelette’, ultimately an alteration of ‘lemelle’, ‘knife blade’ (from Latin ‘lamella’), with reference to the flattened shape of the dish
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘Mother Carey’s chicken’
probably from Latin ‘Mater Cara’ or Italian ‘Madre Cara’, ‘dear mother’, i.e. the Virgin Mary, believed by sailors to send the petrel as a harbinger of storms
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘the Slough of Despond’
the name of a deep boggy place at the beginning of Christian’s journey to the Celestial City in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ (1678), by John Bunyan
Read Moreorigin of ‘eavesdrop’
‘To eavesdrop’ originally referred to standing within the eavesdrop (the ground on to which water drips from the eaves of a house) in order to overhear what is going on inside.
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘let’s return to our muttons’
to return to the matter in hand—from French ‘revenons à nos moutons’ (‘let’s return to our sheep’), allusion to ‘La Farce de Maistre Pierre Pathelin’ (ca 1457)
Read Moreorigin of ‘to break the ice’
from the image of breaking the frozen surface of a river in order to make a passage for boats – probably from Latin ‘scindere glaciem’, in Erasmus’s Adages
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