the birth of the colourful noun ‘cackleberry’
USA, 1889—humorous, informal: a hen’s egg—composed of ‘cackle’, the raucous clucking cry given by a hen, especially after laying an egg, and of ‘berry’
Read MoreTag: vegetal
meaning and origin of the phrase ‘tall poppy’
UK, 1816—successful person attracting envious hostility—from Tarquin’s decapitation of the tallest poppies to indicate the fate of enemies
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘to know how many beans make five’
to be sensible and intelligent—1784 in a US publication, but attributed to “a gentleman from abroad”—‘blue’, meaningless fanciful intensive, sometimes before ‘beans’
Read Moreorigin of ‘couch potato’ and of ‘boob tuber’ (TV addict)
In ‘couch potato’, ‘potato’ may be a pun on ‘tuber’ in ‘boob tuber’, from ‘boob tube’ (= television (set)), in which ‘boob’ means ‘stupid, foolish’.
Read Moreorigin of ‘bee’ (social gathering for a specific purpose)
USA, late 18th century—perhaps a folk-etymological alteration of British dialectal variants of ‘boon’, meaning ‘help given by neighbours’
Read Moreorigin of ‘Bananaland’, colloquial Australian name for Queensland
Australia, 1880—from the fact that bananas grow in abundance in Queensland (a state comprising the north-eastern part of Australia)
Read Morethe appearance of ‘banana republic’ in the USA in 1901
a Latin-American country that is politically unstable because its economy, controlled by U.S. capital, wholly depends on the export of bananas
Read Morethe Bloody Mary before the name existed
Unnamed cocktails consisting of vodka and tomato juice became fashionable in the 1930s before the name ‘Bloody Mary’ was coined in November 1939.
Read Morethe curious origin of ‘the mind boggles’
primary meaning of ‘boggle’ was ‘to start with fright’, originally with reference to horses—probably related to the nouns ‘bogle’ and ‘bogey’, denoting an evil spirit such as horses are reputed to see
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘the milk in the coconut’
‘the milk in the coconut’: a puzzling fact or circumstance; alludes to the question of how the milk got into the coconut—of British-English origin (1832), not of American-English origin as stated by the Oxford English Dictionary
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