meaning and history of ‘to write to The Times about it’
UK, 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
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some early figurative uses of ‘Möbius strip’
US 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 Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘the silly season’
coined in The Saturday Review (London, 13 July 1861) about the shortage of important news in autumn in The Times of London
Read Morea personal view on the ‘animal-friendly’ phrases suggested by PETA
Fundamentally, I object to the will of any group to artificially modify language in order to impose their world view.
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘Matthew effect’ and of ‘Matthew principle’
USA, 1960s—those who already have will receive more—refers to gospel of Matthew—coined by sociologist Robert King Merton
Read Morepejorative origin of ‘Nimby’ (opposition to a project in one’s vicinity)
USA, 1979—acronym from ‘not in my back yard’—first used in ‘the Nimby syndrome’ with reference to the disposal of nuclear waste
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘the milk in the coconut’
‘the milk in the coconut’: a puzzling fact or circumstance; alludes to the question of how the milk got into the coconut—of British-English origin (1832), not of American-English origin as stated by the Oxford English Dictionary
Read Morenotes on ‘ailurophile’ (cat lover)
USA, 1914—‘ailurophile’: a cat lover—‘ailurophobe’: opposite sense—based on ancient Greek ‘aílouros’, ‘cat’, perhaps from ‘aiόlos’, ‘swift’, and ‘ourá’, ‘tail’, the cat being perhaps so called on account of the swift movement to and fro of its tail
Read Morean American phrase for a British trait: ‘a stiff upper lip’
‘a stiff upper lip’: a quality of uncomplaining stoicism—now understood as referring to what is believed to be a quintessentially British trait, the repression of emotion, but originated in fact in North America (USA, 1811)
Read More‘six of one and half a dozen of the other’
denotes a situation in which the alternatives are considered equivalent—first recorded, as ‘six of the one and half a dozen of the other’, on 24th April 1790 in the journal of Ralph Clark, a British naval officer—synonym: ‘(as) broad as long’
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word histories 