Tag: military

‘scholasticide’: meaning and origin

.Reading time 6 minutes.

the systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel—apparently coined in 2009 by Karma Nabulsi, Fellow in Politics at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford

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‘old boy network’: meaning and origin

.Reading time 16 minutes.

UK, 1950, as ‘old boy net’—a system of favouritism and preferment operating among people of a similar social, usually privileged, background, especially among former pupils of public schools

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notes on ‘Kleenex’ in similes

.Reading time 9 minutes.

USA, 1945—‘Kleenex’ (a proprietary name for a soft, disposable paper tissue) is used in similes expressing, in particular, disposability, ephemerality, fragility, weakness

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‘not on your nelly’: meaning and origin

.Reading time 17 minutes.

‘not under any circumstances’—Royal Air Force slang, 1942—short for ‘not on your Nelly Duff’, i.e., ‘not on your life’, ‘Nelly Duff’ being rhyming slang for ‘puff’ as used colloquially in the sense of ‘life’

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‘dillbrain’: meaning and origin

.Reading time 10 minutes.

Australia, 1943—a foolish or silly person—from the synonymous noun ‘dill’ (1933), itself apparently a back-formation from the adjective ‘dilly’, meaning ‘foolish’, ‘silly’

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‘Baedeker raid’: meaning and origin

.Reading time 12 minutes.

one of the German air raids in 1942 on places of cultural and historical importance in Britain—from ‘Baedeker’: any of a series of guidebooks to foreign countries, issued by the German publisher Karl Baedeker (1801-1859) and his successors

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‘munitionette’: meaning and origin

.Reading time 13 minutes.

UK, 1915—a female worker in a munitions factory, especially during the First World War (1914-18)—from ‘munition’ and the suffix ‘-ette’, denoting women or girls linked with, or carrying out a role indicated by, the first element

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