“ad fontes!”
MEANING to smell a rat: to detect something suspicious ORIGIN The first known use of this phrase is in The Image of Ipocrysy, an anonymous poem written around 1540, denouncing “the cruell clergy”: (published in 1843) Suche be owr [= our] primates, Our bisshopps and prelates, Our parsons and curates, With other […]
Read More
MEANING The phrase back to the drawing board is used to indicate that an idea, scheme or proposal has been unsuccessful and that a new one must be devised. ORIGIN This phrase originated in a cartoon by the U.S. cartoonist Peter Arno (Curtis Arnoux Peters, Jr – 1904-68), published in The New […]
Read MoreThe phrase to sleep like a top means to sleep very soundly. In A Concise Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1993), B. A. Phythian explains that, unlikely as it may seem, the top referred to here is the child’s toy which seems not to be moving when it is spinning, though it wobbles when being […]
Read More
from Keeping Up With The Joneses (Cupples & Leon Company – New York, 1920) by ‘Pop’ Momand MEANING If you say that someone is keeping up with the Joneses, you mean that they are doing something in order to show that they have as much money as other people, rather than because […]
Read Morean alternative explanation of the phrase “it is raining cats and dogs”
Read MoreFirst recorded circa 1629 as ‘to rain dogs and cats’, this phrase is based on a cat-and-dog fight as a metaphor for a storm or hard rain; the theory that Jonathan Swift coined the phrase is ludicrous.
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘strawberry preacher’
Read MoreIn the phrase ‘in Dicky’s meadow’, which means ‘in trouble’, the first element is an alteration of ‘dicky’, meaning ‘hazardous’, ‘critical’.
Read MoreSexual puns in 17th-century English theatre explain several meanings of ‘P’s and Q’s’.
Read More
