“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
Read MoreUK, 1811—a proposed course of action is bound to lead to disaster—quotation from King Lear, a tragedy by William Shakespeare
Read MoreUK, 1849—transformation into a pumpkin; extravagant or absurdly uncritical glorification—coined after Hellenistic Greek ‘ἀποκολοκύντωσις’, the title of a travesty ascribed to Seneca, according to which the deceased Roman emperor Claudius, instead of being elevated to divine status, is changed into a pumpkin
Read Moreto praise oneself—first used by Benjamin Franklin in 1729—the image is that, when one’s trumpeter is dead, one is forced to find one’s own trumpet
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UK, 1869—used to denounce arbitrariness—alludes to a demand by the Queen of Hearts during the trial of the Knave of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
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the drawing of the ‘Gerry-mander’ and the accompanying text—as published in the Boston Gazette (Boston, Massachusetts) of 26 March 1812
Read MoreUK, 1789—aided by alliteration, arose from a long-established figurative use of ‘brass’, sometimes in association with ‘bold’
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17th century—allusion to the Aeneid, by Virgil, in which the Sybil throws a drugged cake to Cerberus, the monstrous dog guarding the entrance to Hades
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refers to the rarity of white elephants and to the story that the king of Pegu waged war on the king of Siam, who had refused to sell him one
Read More1696—perhaps from ‘latet anguis in herba’ (a snake hides in the grass) in Virgil’s Eclogues—cf. ‘a pad [= toad] in the straw’ and French ‘il y a de l’oignon’
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word histories 