meaning 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 More“ad fontes!”
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 MoreIn ‘couch potato’, ‘potato’ may be a pun on ‘tuber’ in ‘boob tuber’, from ‘boob tube’ (= television (set)), in which ‘boob’ means ‘stupid, foolish’.
Read MoreUSA, late 18th century—perhaps a folk-etymological alteration of British dialectal variants of ‘boon’, meaning ‘help given by neighbours’
Read MoreAustralia, 1880—from the fact that bananas grow in abundance in Queensland (a state comprising the north-eastern part of Australia)
Read Morea Latin-American country that is politically unstable because its economy, controlled by U.S. capital, wholly depends on the export of bananas
Read MoreUnnamed cocktails consisting of vodka and tomato juice became fashionable in the 1930s before the name ‘Bloody Mary’ was coined in November 1939.
Read Moreprimary 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 More‘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
Read MoreUSA—‘apple polisher’ (1918): a person who curries favour with a superior; ‘apple polishing’ (1926): (an instance of) currying favour—with reference to the former practice of bringing a shiny apple as a gift to one’s teacher
Read MoreUK, 1788—denotes an auction in which the price is lowered by stages until a buyer is found—said to have been invented by the Dutch specifically as the best solution to selling tulip bulbs
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