May 25, 2022
Stipulate – state phrases – from various ancient and medieval customs when a straw was utilized in contract-making, significantly in mortgage arrangements, and likewise in feudal England when the landowner would current the tenant with a broken straw to signify the ending of a contract. Spinster – unmarried girl – in Saxon occasions a woman was not thought of fit for marriage till she could spin yarn correctly. Interestingly, and in comparable chauvanistic vein, the word ‘wife’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon ‘wyfan’, to weave, subsequent after spinning within the cloth-making course of. Speedy gonzales – a really quick particular person – some would possibly bear in mind the Warner Brothers Speedy Gonzales cartoon character; the original Speedy Gonzales was apparently a Mexican-American movie studio animator, so known as due to his common lunchtime dash for carnal liaison with a lady in the paint and ink division. Pull your socks up – smarten your self up, get a transfer on, focus – an admonishment or phrases of encouragement. Allen’s English Phrases says it’s from the turn of the 1800s and quotes HF McClelland “Pull up your socks. I’ll see naught goes wrong with you…” from Jack and the Beanstalk, 1893.
Biscuit in America is a different thing to biscuit in Britain, the latter being equivalent to the American ‘cookie’. Bun to many people in England is an easy bread roll or cob, however has many older associations to sweeter baked rolls and muffins . The English language was rather completely different in those days, so Heywood’s variations of those expressions (the translations used by Bartlett’s are proven below) are usually somewhat different to fashionable utilization, but the essence is evident to see, and a few are notably elegant in their old type.
Unfortunately formal sources seem not to help the notion, fascinating although it’s. On tenterhooks – very anxious with expectation – a metaphor from the early English cloth-making process where cloth can be stretched or ‘tentered’ on hooks positioned in its seamed edges. ‘Tentered’ derives from the Latin ‘tentus’, which means stretched, which can be the origin of the word ‘tent’, being made of stretched canvas. Another attainable derivation links the tenterhooks expression to the brewery docks of Elizabethan London , where the apply on the old Anchor Brewery on the Thames’ south financial institution was apparently to insert hooks, referred to as ‘tenters’ into the barrels, enabling them extra simply to be hoisted from the quayside into waiting boats. Nothing to sneeze at/not to be sneezed at – okay, not so dangerous, satisfactory, nothing to be disliked – the expression was in use late 19thC and doubtless earlier. 1870 Brewer explains that the expression advanced from the usage of the word snuff in a similar sense.
The cover is visually haunting and aptly symbolic of the guide’s content. The wings morph into twin images of what looks like an MRI of a human mind, conveying an eerie glimpse into Thornton’s expertise. But as soon as you may be out of college and should take care of yourself, it’s important to be positive to proceed to write down that type of platitude.
Inaccurate portrayals of mental sickness in television, movies, and different types of media further perpetuate these beliefs. Spin a yarn – tell a fanciful tale or a tall story – According to Chambers the expression was originally a nautical one, first showing in print about 1812. Indeed spinning yarn was a big and essential nautical exercise, and integral to rope making. In some circumstances a winch was used, operated by two men, who presumably passed their time working collectively telling tales of all sorts, which makes the nautical derivation of the metaphor highly doubtless and very believable.
However the ‘off your trolley’ expression is extra probably derived from the which means of trolley that was and is used to describe the overhead pick-up for an electrical car, including the ‘trolley wheel’, which related the vehicle’s overhead booms to the power wires. The car – commonly a bus or a tramcar – that was powered through energitoto this a trolley-wheel electrical connection was called a trolley car, or streetcar or trolley bus. In this sense the word trolley associated to the trolley-wheel assembly connecting the car to the overhead power traces, to not the automobile itself.