“Ad fontes!”
to do or say something which causes trouble, controversy or upset—first occurs (1841 & 1843, Yorkshire, northern England) in quotation marks, which indicates that it was already in common usage
Read More1910—used of a weakling, or of someone or something that is ineffectual—may have originated in Yorkshire, a county of northern England
Read More1955—originated in stage plays purporting to depict life in northern England, particularly in Lancashire—‘mill’: a factory
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mid-16th century—meaning: to wait for the death of a person with the expectancy of succeeding to his possessions or office; implies a futile wait
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(British) benefit paid by the state to the unemployed (1919)—from Middle-English sense ‘food or money given in charity’—from primary sense ‘portion’, ‘share’
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19th century, northern England—apparently a variant of ‘geck’, of Germanic origin, meaning ‘a fool’, ‘a dupe’, ‘an oaf’
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In the name of the farmhouse, ‘wuthering’ is a “provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.”
Read Morefrom the bakers’ former practice of adding a loaf to a dozen, either as a safeguard against accusations of giving light weight or as the retailer’s profit
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Kindertransport (from German ‘Kinder’, children): operation from 1938 to 1940 to evacuate (mostly Jewish) children from Nazi-controlled areas of Europe to the UK
Read MoreThe word ‘tyke’, a nickname for a person from Yorkshire, originally meant ‘mongrel’. The people from Yorkshire have adopted it as a term of self-reference.
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word histories 