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word histories

how words and phrases came into existence

Tag: medicine

meaning and origin of the phrase ‘Punch’s advice—don’t’

5th November 2019.Reading time 14 minutes.

from “advice to persons about to marry—don’t”, published in ‘Punch’s Almanack for 1845’ (24 December 1844) by the magazine ‘Punch, or the London Charivari’

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the origin and various meanings of ‘buy me and stop one’

24th October 2019.Reading time 9 minutes.

UK, 1970s: frequently scrawled on contraceptive-vending devices in public conveniences—reversal of ‘stop me and buy one’, Wall’s Ice Cream advertising slogan

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meaning and origin of ‘little Audrey joke’

11th October 2019.Reading time 22 minutes.

a joke involving a pun or double entendre opening with ‘but little Audrey just laughed and laughed because she knew’—January 1926, Kansas City Star (Missouri)

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meaning and origin of the term ‘(Dr.) Kevorkian’

13th September 2019.Reading time 10 minutes.

USA, 1990s—purveyor of doom, especially agent of death, force of suicide—refers to Jack Kevorkian (1928-2011), U.S. physician and advocate of assisted suicide

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meanings and early instances of ‘Freudian slip’

15th August 2019.Reading time 16 minutes.

USA, 1927—a slip of the tongue by which the speaker reveals an unconscious thought—named after Austrian neurologist and psychotherapist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

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meanings and history of the term ‘glass jaw’

11th July 2019.Reading time 21 minutes.

USA—1904 (boxing) a weak jaw that is easily broken—1914 (allegorical) preceded by the adjective ‘moral’—1931 (figurative) a vulnerable point—synonym: ‘china chin’

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meaning and history of the term ‘man flu’

8th July 2019.Reading time 11 minutes.

1999—a cold as experienced by a man who is regarded as exaggerating the severity of the symptoms—popularised by British magazine Nuts in 2006

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origin of ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’

24th May 2019.Reading time 19 minutes.

UK, 1892—postdates by several years variants such as ‘eat an apple on going to bed, and you will keep the doctor from earning his bread’

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meaning and origin of ‘Procrustean bed/Procrustean remedy’

23rd April 2019.Reading time 17 minutes.

a means of enforcing conformity—Greek mythology: Procrustes was a robber who made his victims fit a bed by either stretching them longer or cutting them shorter

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a hypothesis as to the origin of ‘to get down to brass tacks’

6th April 2019.Reading time 18 minutes.

USA, 1868—‘brass tacks’: the nails studded over a coffin, hence figuratively the end of any possibility of deceit, the return to essentials

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