“ad fontes!”
UK, 1904—refers to the action of making someone stop chattering—from the colloquial imperative phrase ‘cut the cackle (and come to the horses)’, meaning: stop talking (and get to the heart of the matter)
Read MoreUK, 1930—one who is born into the Roman Catholic Church (i.e., a Catholic ‘from the cradle’)
Read More‘stop talking (and get to the heart of the matter)’—UK, 1878—said to have been coined by circus proprietor Andrew Ducrow when apostrophising equestrian performers
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a person’s mouth—British-Army slang, 1916
Read Morealso ‘moustache of milk’—UK, 1872—a white residue, resembling a growth of hair above the upper lip, left after drinking milk
Read MoreUK, 1866, sailors’ slang: a straw mattress—Australia, 1884: a straw hat—in reference to donkeys’ diet
Read More1777, in a translation of a letter written by Voltaire in 1768—a loan translation from French ‘l’histoire n’est qu’une fable convenue’, first used in 1758 by the French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvétius
Read MoreUK, 1812—an imaginary functionary humorously supposed to control the state of the weather—also ‘clerk of the weather office’
Read MoreUK, 1965—humorous—the Soviet supersonic airliner Tupolev Tu-144—from ‘Concorde’, the name of an Anglo-French supersonic airliner, and the suffix ‘-ski’, in humorous imitation of Russian
Read MoreUK, 1822—a vituperative gossip, a scandalmonger; an evil or malicious tongue—a borrowing from French ‘mauvaise langue’ (literally ‘bad tongue’) of same significations
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word histories 