“ad fontes!”
‘Glamour’ was originally a Scottish alteration of ‘grammar’: this article explains how it came to denote an attractive or exciting quality that makes certain people or things seem appealing. Classical Greek γραμματική (= grammatikḗ) and classical Latin grammătĭca denoted the methodical study of literature, that is to say, philology in the widest modern sense, including textual […]
Read More‘queen’s’, or ‘king’s’, ‘cushion’: a seat made by two people who cross arms and hold each other’s hands to form a support for another person—Scotland and northern England, 19th century
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UK, 1707—‘to take the (King’s/Queen’s) shilling’: to sign up as a soldier, from the former practice of giving a shilling to a recruit when he enlisted
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mid-16th century—meaning: to wait for the death of a person with the expectancy of succeeding to his possessions or office; implies a futile wait
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probably British English, 1880s—to make an effort to improve or reform, ‘to pull oneself together’—based on the image of sprucing oneself up
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from Medieval Latin ‘paraphernalia’, short for ‘paraphernalia bona’, ‘married woman’s property’, i.e. the goods which a bride brings over and above her dowry
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In the name of the farmhouse, ‘wuthering’ is a “provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.”
Read MoreThis phrase is a transformation of ‘one’s head full of bees’, meaning scatter-brained, unable to think straight, as if bees are buzzing around in one’s head.
Read MoreThe verb ‘sneeze’ is an alteration of the obsolete verb ‘fnese’ due to misreading or misprinting it as ‘ſnese’ (= ‘snese’).
Read More‘Mad as a hatter’ might be from ‘like a hatter’, an intensive phrase meaning ‘like mad’, perhaps related to the verb ‘hotter’, expressing motion and emotion.
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word histories 