“Ad fontes!”
from ‘the history of the four kings’, punning on ‘the four kings’ (the four playing cards in a pack, each bearing a representation of a king) and ‘the Book of Kings’ (the name of two, formerly four, books of the Old Testament)
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a man and woman in the act of copulation—English: earliest in Shakespeare’s Othello—perhaps a calque of French: earliest in Rabelais’s Gargantua (1542)
Read MoreThis phrase originated in the belief that bear cubs were born formless and had to be licked into shape by their mother.
Read MoreJames Crichton of Clunie (circa 1560-1582) was a Scottish prodigy of intellectual and knightly accomplishments, and the epithet admirable became traditionally applied to him. The Scottish scholar John Johnston (circa 1565-1611) used the Latin adjective admirabilis in Heroes ex omni historia Scotica lectissimi (1603), a collection of biographies and eulogies in elegiac couplets of great […]
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word histories 