meaning and origin of ‘curse you, Red Baron!’
colourful way of railing at someone—USA, 1967—from Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts: Snoopy as a WW1 fighter pilot falls victim to German ace Manfred von Richthofen
Read MoreTag: military
history of ‘slower than the second coming of Christ’
extremely slow—USA, 1874—in Christian theology, the Second Coming of Christ is the prophesied return of Christ to Earth at the Last Judgement
Read Morehistory of ‘— is just one damned thing after another’
USA, 1909—first with grammatical subject ‘life’, meaning ‘life consists of a succession of unpleasant or unlucky events’—then with other grammatical subjects
Read More‘lay on, Macduff’ | ‘lead on, Macduff’
from Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’—1814 ‘lay on, Macduff’: go ahead (and give it your best try)—1855 misquotation ‘lead on, Macduff’: let’s get going, start us off
Read Moreorigin of ‘old soldiers never die (they simply fade away)’
UK, 1913—from a British Army song (1908) parodying a hymn titled ‘Kind Words Can Never Die’ (USA, 1859)
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘Maggie’s drawers’
U.S. Army slang 1936—a red flag waved to indicate a complete miss on a target range—probably from bawdy song ‘Those Little Red Drawers That My Maggie Wore’
Read Morehistory of ‘that’s the stuff to give ’em/to give the troops’
First World War military slang—extended forms of ‘that’s the stuff’—used in approval of what has just been done or said, or to mean ‘that is what is needed’
Read More‘mushroom treatment: kept in the dark and fed bullshit’
American English, 1965—signification: to be kept in a state of ignorance and told nonsense—in use a few years later in Australian English and British English
Read More‘a bird cannot fly on one wing’: meaning and origin
USA, 1902—jocularly used to justify the necessity of taking another alcoholic drink—Irish variant (1947): ‘a bird never flew on one wing’
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase “’arf a mo’, Kaiser!”
“half a moment, Kaiser!”—1914 as the caption to a drawing by Bert Thomas, published in the Weekly Dispatch (London) to advertise a tobacco fund for soldiers
Read More
