“ad fontes!”
the alleged duty of the white peoples to bring their civilisation to other peoples regarded as backward—USA, 1865—in early use, often referred to the relations between European Americans and African an Americans
Read Morecrowded or confined tightly together—Britain, 1706—in early use, this phrase often referred to the transatlantic slave trade
Read Moreused of something impossible to obtain or achieve—1796—the image is of an illusory quest for the treasure supposed to lie where the rainbow appears to touch the ground
Read Morea representation of the letter A in scarlet cloth which Hester Prynne is condemned to wear in The Scarlet Letter (1850), by Nathaniel Hawthorne—soon came to be used figuratively in the sense of a stigma, a mark of infamy
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USA—‘come (right) down to the brass’ (1854): get to the point; tackle the essentials—‘come down to brass tacks’ (1863): tackle the essentials
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mid-19th century—loan translation from German ‘das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten’ (to empty out the child with the bath), early 16th century
Read Morerobotically conformist or obedient—from The Stepford Wives (1972 novel by Ira Levin and 1975 film adaptation by Bryan Forbes), in which Stepford is the name of a superficially idyllic suburb where the men have replaced their wives with obedient robots
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This phrase originated in the history of American slavery: the river was the Mississippi and down implied the transfer of slaves from north to south.
Read MoreThe word ‘slave’ is from Medieval Latin ‘Sclavus’, ‘Slav’, because the Slavic peoples were frequently reduced to a servile condition by the Germanic conquest.
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Briton settlements in the 6th century – settlements of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in Britain, circa 600 In the following, Briton will refer to the Celtic Brittonic-speaking peoples who inhabited Britain south of the Firth of Forth, and who, following the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century, gradually retreated until the […]
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