a hypothesis as to the origin of the phrase ‘to paint the town red’
USA, 1881—seems to have originated in the image of a torchlit procession or/and of a firework display that illuminate(s) a town
Read MoreTag: sports & games
‘midinette’: originally a seamstress taking a light dinner at midday
Phonetically and semantically similar to milliner, the French word midinette was defined as “a milliner’s female assistant, especially in Paris” in the 1933 Supplement to the New English Dictionary (as the Oxford English Dictionary was known). However, while milliner literally means a Milanese, a native or inhabitant of Milan, midinette is a portmanteau word, composed […]
Read Moreorigin and history of the word ‘sport’
The noun sport is a shortening of disport, which was borrowed in the early 14th century from Anglo-Norman and Old and Middle French forms such as desport, deport, disport (modern French déport). This French word was thus defined by Randle Cotgrave in A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611): Deport: masculine. Disport, sport, […]
Read Morehistory and origin of the word ‘tennis’
The word tennis in its current sense is short for lawn tennis. The original form of tennis (known as real tennis to distinguish it from the later lawn tennis) was played with a solid ball on an enclosed court divided into equal but dissimilar halves, the service side (from which service was always delivered) and […]
Read Moreorigin of ‘from pillar to post’
The phrase from pillar to post means from one place to another in an unceremonious or fruitless manner. Its earliest recorded form is from post to pillar in The Assembly of Gods, an anonymous dream-vision allegory most likely written in the early fourth quarter of the 15th century (it was initially attributed to John Lydgate (1370-1449) […]
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘gongoozler’
The noun ‘gongoozler’, denoting a person who stares protractedly at anything, originally designated an idler who stares at length at activity on a canal.
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘to sleep like a top’
The phrase to sleep like a top means to sleep very soundly. In A Concise Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1993), B. A. Phythian explains that, unlikely as it may seem, the top referred to here is the child’s toy which seems not to be moving when it is spinning, though it wobbles when being […]
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