“Ad fontes!”
1609—to add to what is already great, also to add difficulty to difficulty—Pelion and Ossa are two mountains in Thessaly—in Greek mythology, two giants, Otus and Ephialtes, tried to pile Pelion and Ossa on Olympus in order to reach the gods and overthrow them
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UK, 1897—‘Piccadilly window’: a monocle—hence ‘Piccadilly-windowed’: monocled—alludes to ‘Piccadilly’, the name of a street and of a circus (i.e., a rounded open space) in London
Read MoreThe phrase ‘below the salt’ originated in the social differentiations materialised by the former custom of placing a large saltcellar in the middle of a dining table.
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‘merrythought’, late 16th century— the forked bone between the neck and breast of a bird—so called from its resemblance to a woman’s external genitals
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mandragoras – from Stirpium historiae pemptades sex sive libri XXX (1583), by Rembert Dodoens The term hand of glory originally denoted a charm made from, or consisting of, the root of a mandrake. A calque of French main de gloire, it was first used in Curiosities of nature and art in husbandry […]
Read MoreThe phrase tit for tat means an equivalent given in return or retaliation. The expression seems to be a variation of the obsolete and more comprehensible tip for tap, in which both tip and tap meant a light but distinct blow, stroke, hit. The phrase therefore meant blow for blow. The words tip and tap first appeared combined in Fortunes Stabilnes, by Charles d’Orléans (1394-1465). Context: the letter patent […]
Read MoreSexual puns in 17th-century English theatre explain several meanings of ‘P’s and Q’s’.
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word histories 