“ad fontes!”
The phrase like a cat on hot bricks and its American-English equivalent like a cat on a hot tin roof mean very agitated or anxious. An earlier form of the phrase was recorded by the English naturalist and theologian John Ray (1627–1705) in A Collection of English Proverbs (2nd edition – 1678): To go like […]
Read MoreThe phrase not a cat in hell’s chance means no chance at all—synonyms: a snowball’s chance (in hell) and a Chinaman’s chance. It is a shortening of the more explicit no more chance than a cat in hell without claws. The earliest instance of this phrase that I have found is from Jackson’s Oxford Journal of 29th September 1753: Poor […]
Read MoreThe Italian noun gianduia (improperly gianduja) appeared in the 19th century to denote a soft confection made with chocolate and ground hazelnuts, first produced in Turin, the capital of Piedmont, a region in north-western Italy, in the foothills of the Alps. (The Italian name is Piemonte, from piede, foot, and monte, mount.) This confection was […]
Read MoreIn The Tragedie of Macbeth (around 1603), by the English poet and playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Gray-Malkin is the name of a fiend in the shape of a grey she-cat, the cat being the form most generally assumed by the familiar spirits of witches according to a common superstition: (Folio 1, 1623) […]
Read MoreThe adjective fed up means annoyed, unhappy or bored, especially with a situation that has existed for a long time. The original, literal meaning is simply sated with food, since to feed up an animal or a person is to supply them with rich and abundant food. For example, the author of Whether Love be a natural or fictitious Passion, published in Pope’s Bath Chronicle of 3rd May 1764, wrote: The […]
Read MoreIn the chapter Our lunatic contributor of Words and names (1933), the British philologist Ernest Weekley (1865-1954) wrote: The correspondence columns of our middlebrow weeklies and of our two Sunday papers are the happy hunting-ground of the amateur etymologist. A few years ago he published the discovery that ‘nap,’ ‘a short sleep,’ was derived from Napoleon’s power of sleeping […]
Read MoreA blend of magpie and piety, the word magpiety was originally invented by the English poet and humorist Thomas Hood (1799-1845) to denote talkativeness, garrulity, especially on religious or moral topics and affected piety. This author first used the word in Jarvis and Mrs. Cope, published in The New Sporting Magazine of March 1832; the poem thus begins: JARVIS AND MRS. COPE. A decidedly serious […]
Read MoreOf American-English origin, the expression to have an axe to grind (American-English spelling ax) means to have a private reason for doing, or being involved in, something. It has often been attributed to Benjamin Franklin [note 1]. For example, the New English Dictionary (NED – 1888), as the Oxford English Dictionary was known, mentions “a […]
Read MoreMEANING The phrase (if you’ll) excuse (or pardon) my French is used as an apology for swearing. ORIGIN The current sense seems to derive from an actual apology for speaking French. (It is therefore unnecessary to invoke the centuries-old adversarial relationship between the English and the French.) The form pardon my French is first attested in Randolph, a Novel (1823), by the American […]
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Aunt Sally – from The Modern Playmate: A book of games, sports, and diversions for boys of all ages (new revised edition – 1875?), by John George Wood (1827-89) The Oxford English Dictionary (first edition – 1885) thus defined Aunt Sally: a game much in vogue at fairs and races, in which […]
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