‘earworm’: meanings and origin
USA, 1982—a catchy song or melody that keeps repeating in one’s mind, especially to the point of irritation—loan translation from German ‘Ohrwurm’—original meaning (1598): an earwig
Read More“Ad fontes!”
USA, 1982—a catchy song or melody that keeps repeating in one’s mind, especially to the point of irritation—loan translation from German ‘Ohrwurm’—original meaning (1598): an earwig
Read Morea phenomenon in which the sun rises or sets in alignment with the streets that run east to west on the street grid of Manhattan, a borough of New York City—from ‘Manhattan’ and ‘-henge’, in ‘Stonehenge’, the name of a megalithic monument in England—coined by U.S. astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
Read MoreAmerican English—a surge of extremely cold air which causes rapid falls in temperature and severe wintry weather in central and eastern areas of the United States and Canada—after ‘Trans-Siberian Express’, the name of a railway running from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan
Read MoreUK—‘the Beast from the East’ (2011): polar continental air mass, which brings wintry conditions—‘the Pest from the West’ (2012): mild air from the Atlantic, which brings strong winds and heavy rainfalls
Read MoreUK, 1904—punning extension (in which ‘time’ is a verb, and ‘flies’ a noun) of the cliché ‘time flies’
Read Morethe demand that an extraterrestrial makes to the first human being or animal it encounters after alighting from its flying saucer—USA, 1956—from a cliché in science-fiction stories
Read MoreUK, 1851—is or jokingly denotes a threat made by a member of the public to write to the London newspaper The Times to express outrage about a particular issue
Read MoreUS 1960—person of whom only one aspect is known; continual phenomenon—from the one-sided continuous surface formed by joining the ends of a half-twisted strip
Read Morecoined in The Saturday Review (London, 13 July 1861) about the shortage of important news in autumn in The Times of London
Read MoreFundamentally, I object to the will of any group to artificially modify language in order to impose their world view.
Read More