‘unshirted hell’: meaning and origin
‘serious trouble’—USA, 1866—from the image of taking off one’s shirt before getting into a fight, and from ‘hell’ in the sense of ‘a severe reprimand’, as in ‘to give someone hell’
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‘gorilla dust’: meaning and origin
USA, 1986—something intended to divert attention from something more important—refers to the fact that when two male gorillas confront each other, they throw dust in the air to distract one another—popularised, if not coined, by Henry Ross Perot
Read More‘to think outside the box’: meaning and origin
USA, 1971—to think creatively or in an unconventional manner—originated in a puzzle in which the aim is to connect nine dots arranged in the form of a square with four consecutive straight lines: the puzzle can be solved only by extending three of the lines outside the box implied by the arrangement of the dots
Read More‘to go ballistic’: meanings and origin
1980s—to become wildly or explosively angry; to become highly excited or enthusiastic; to intensify rapidly and especially alarmingly—refers to the failure of a guided missile’s guidance system (1966)
Read More‘tickety-boo’: meaning, early occurrences and origin
UK, 1938—old-fashioned informal British-English adjective meaning ‘in good order’, ‘fine’—origin obscure: perhaps from Hindi ‘ṭhīk hai’ (‘all right’) or from ‘the ticket’ (‘the correct thing’); or it may simply be a purely fanciful formation
Read More‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’: meaning, origin and variants
‘something new can only be judged to be good or bad after it has been tried or used’ (‘proof’ = ‘test’)—1623, in Remaines, concerning Britaine, by W. Camden
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