“ad fontes!”
21st century: the practice of maintaining a certain distance between oneself and other people in order to prevent infection with a disease—20th century: the practice of maintaining a degree of remoteness or emotional separation from another person or social group
Read Moreexceedingly busy—USA, 1906—chiefly in the extended form ‘as busy as a one-armed paper hanger with the hives’
Read MoreUK—applied to dark clouds looming—originally (1927) ‘over Will’s mother’s’ denoted the west—origin unknown
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USA, 1931—jocular variant (coined on separate occasions by various persons, independently from one another) of ‘here today (and) gone tomorrow’
Read More‘anything for a quiet wife’ (1875)—jocular variant of ‘anything for a quiet life’ (ca. 1620), which expresses concession or resigned agreement, to ensure one is not disturbed
Read More1970—British and Irish English—acronym from the phrase ‘all coppers are bastards’—customarily written (tattooed in particular) rather than spoken
Read More1955—originated in stage plays purporting to depict life in northern England, particularly in Lancashire—‘mill’: a factory
Read Moreto praise oneself—first used by Benjamin Franklin in 1729—the image is that, when one’s trumpeter is dead, one is forced to find one’s own trumpet
Read Moretwo people, especially lovers, should be left alone together—UK, 1829 as ‘two is company, three none’—but notion already proverbial in 1678
Read Morewith reference to the sand-beaches of Florida: to have come to enjoy living in Florida—USA, 1884
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word histories 