“ad fontes!”
USA, 1986—something intended to divert attention from something more important—refers to the fact that when two male gorillas confront each other, they throw dust in the air to distract one another—popularised, if not coined, by Henry Ross Perot
Read MoreUSA, 1938—unemployment insurance, and, broadly, any benefit paid to someone who is not working
Read MoreUSA—1901 as ‘rocking-chair work’—1907 as ‘rocking-chair job’—a sinecure, i.e., an office or position providing an income or other advantage but requiring little or no work
Read MoreU.S.A, 1932—also ‘the land of nuts and fruits’—a humorous, sometimes derogatory, appellation for the U.S. state of California—refers to California’s agricultural bounties and to Californians regarded as being ‘nuts’, i.e., crazy
Read MoreUK, 1978—(soccer players) a confrontation that does not lead to serious fighting—based on the cliché ‘pistols at ten paces’—the substitution of ‘pistols’ with ‘handbags’, which evokes women fighting with their handbags, expresses the histrionic character of the confrontation
Read MoreAustralia, 1944—the customary bout of hasty drinking in public houses at the end of the working day, occasioned by the former six-o’clock-closing regulations
Read MoreAustralia, 1825—liquor sold without a licence—here, the adjective ‘sly’ means ‘secret’, ‘covert’, ‘clandestine’
Read More1890s—to use extravagant words or language not substantiated by fact; to talk nonsense—occurs in particular in stories by the British authors Ernest William Hornung (1866-1921) and Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975)
Read MoreUK—since 1981, has been associated with a speech by the Employment Secretary, Norman Tebbit, at the Conservative Party conference, in which he exhorted the unemployed to go and find work, like his father, who had “got on his bike and looked for work”
Read More‘999’ denotes the telephone number used to contact the emergency services in the United Kingdom. This telephone number was introduced in 1937 by Walter Womersley, who was then the Assistant Postmaster-General.
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