“ad fontes!”
‘Hobby’, diminutive of ‘Hob’, pet form of ‘Robert’, was used to denote a small horse, hence a child’s toy with a horse’s head, hence a favourite occupation—cf. French ‘dada’, child’s word for horse, used to denote a favourite pastime
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some characteristic slang creations of the British, U.S. and French soldiers during World War One, as recorded in ‘Trench Talk’, published in Everybody’s Magazine (New York) of January 1918
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‘flash in the pan’: originally referred to the priming gunpowder flaring up in the flash-pan without then exploding the main charge in the barrel of a firearm
Read Moreperhaps identical to ‘pie’ (‘magpie’)—variety of ingredients maybe associated with bird’s spotted appearance or its tendency to collect miscellaneous articles
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The word ‘folklore’ was coined in 1846 by the British author William John Thoms, inspired by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s anthology of German fairy tales.
Read More‘with minute exactness’—UK, 1693—probably a shortening of synonymous ‘to a tittle’ (1607), ‘tittle’ meaning ‘a small mark used in writing or printing’
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UK, 1971, in graffiti—preceded by a proper or common noun in the singular or plural; used to assert the pre-eminence of a specified person or thing
Read Moremid-17th cent. in the sense ‘brand new’—from ‘spick and span new’, extension of ‘span new’, from Old Norse ‘spán-nýr’, ‘as new as a freshly cut wooden chip’
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1571—probably from obsolete French ‘de pointe en blanc’, used of firing into empty space for the purpose of seeing how far a piece of artillery would carry
Read MoreThe noun ‘spud’, originally the name for the digging implement used to dig up potatoes, was applied to the latter in the 19th century.
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word histories 