Tag: Oscar Wilde

‘ships that pass in the night’: meanings and origin

.Reading time 9 minutes.

people who meet for a short time, by chance, and then do not see each other again—people who, although living together, are unable to see very much of each other—coined in 1873 by the U.S. poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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‘Bunburying’: meaning and origin

.Reading time 12 minutes.

UK, 1895—the use of an imaginary person as a fictitious excuse for visiting a place or avoiding obligations—from ‘Bunbury’, the name of an imaginary character in The Importance of being Earnest (first performed in 1895), by Oscar Wilde

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