“ad fontes!”
New York City, 1896—a lawyer who seeks accident victims as clients and encourages them to sue for damages—refers to lawyers, or their agents, following ambulances taking accident victims to hospital, in order to gain access to those victims
Read Moreto hurry up (1849 in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield); the image is of a skater gliding rapidly over an ice surface—also, in early use (USA, 1886): to get drunk; the rolling gait of a drunk person is likened to the swaying motion of an ice skater
Read MoreIreland, 1832—particularly associated with Lord Robert Armstrong and the ‘Spycatcher’ trial (1986)—‘economy of truth’ was used in 1796 by Edmund Burke
Read MoreUK, 1992—coined by Alan Clark during the Matrix Churchill trial—variant of ‘to be economical with the truth’, meaning: to deceive people by deliberately not telling them the whole truth about something
Read Moreto be utterly defeated—alludes to the defeat of Napoléon I at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815—UK, 1832, as ‘to meet with a Waterloo’—USA, 1838, as ‘to meet one’s Waterloo’
Read MoreUK, 1922—used in negative constructions with a following noun to mean ‘a single ——’, ‘any ——’; the nouns most commonly used in those constructions are ‘notice’ and ‘difference’
Read Morea profession which has long been established or which is regarded as having similarities with prostitution—also sometimes used jocularly—alludes to ‘the oldest profession in the world’ (i.e., prostitution)
Read Moreto court danger by behaving in an obviously risky manner that cannot be sustained for long—1841 in an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Read Morea man’s habit of sexual promiscuity or infidelity—refers to the zipper on the flies of a pair of trousers—USA, 1982, originally used of Members of Congress in Washington, D.C., and recorded by gossip columnist Diana McLellan
Read MoreUK, 1803, as an adjective—UK, 1842, as a noun—in reference to the action or practice of attacking, or acting against, someone in a treacherous or underhand manner
Read More
word histories 