history of the phrase ‘(it) takes one to know one’
USA, 1926—only a person with a given personality, characteristic, etc., is able to identify that quality in someone else—particularly used of homosexuals
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notes on the phrase ‘a licence to print money’
North America, 1943: used of owners of professional baseball teams—Britain, 1958: used of the franchises granted for running commercial television stations
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘nudge, nudge’
draws attention to a sexual innuendo—generally refers to an October 1969 sketch from the British comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus—but in use earlier
Read Morethe Australian phrase ‘to kill a brown dog’: meanings, origin
1950—used of a substance causing death or illness, and by extension of something powerful or disastrous—refers to red kelpie sheep dogs, who can ingest anything
Read Moremeanings of the British phrase ‘vicarage tea-party’
20th century—denotes something mild, innocuous or uneventful—but those notions have been associated with vicarage tea-parties since the 19th century
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘only here for the beer’
UK Ireland—only here for a bit of fun—from “I’m only here for the beer. It’s Double Diamond”, advertising slogan for Double Diamond pale ale from 1969 onwards
Read Morethe phrase ‘two hairs past a freckle’ and variants
used as a jocular reply by a person who does not have a watch, when asked what the time is—also ‘half past a freckle’, ‘according to the hairs on my wrist’
Read More‘gizza job’: a phrase of the mass-unemployment age
‘give us a job’—UK, 1983—used by Yosser Hughes, a character in Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), a BBC TV drama series on the desperation bred by unemployment
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘to light the (blue) touchpaper’
UK, mid-1950s—to set a course of exciting or dramatic events in motion—refers to firework instructions such as ‘light the blue touchpaper and retire immediately’
Read Morethe birth of an American phrase: ‘Where’s the beef?’
January 1984—from a television advertisement for the hamburger chain Wendy’s, in which an elderly lady demands where the beef is in a huge hamburger bun
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word histories 