Toff

Toff – ‘a rich or upper class person’.

University dress includes an academic cap, or mortarboard, with a black tassel. At Oxford and Cambridge from around the 1600s the titled young undergraduates began to wear gold tassels, known as tufts, as a mark of their superior status.

As often happens with language, the word’s usage was extended to the young men themselves. It gradually shifted to tofts and by the mid-1800s was toffs. It became a slang word used by the working class for the upper class, or for someone who dressed smartly, as an aristocrat might.

The nowadays rarely-heard tuft hunter, for a sycophant or toady, has its origins here too. A tuft hunter was someone who followed, flattered and fawned before these young noblemen.

Flavour of the month

Meaning: Something temporarily in fashion – akin to a ‘one-hit wonder’.

This relatively recent expression comes from American advertising posters of the 1930s. It became popular with ice cream companies who saw a flavour-of-the-month as a great marketing idea. Often the featured flavour would be offered at a reduced price to encouraged customers to part with their money.

This expression is used often now in a derogatory way for a celebrity considered overrated. The phrase suggests that a meteoric rise to fame is most likely to be quickly followed by a meteoric fall.

Send to Coventry

If you send someone to Coventry, you ignore them or ostracise them from your group. It is form of a playground bullying and also used to punish strike-breakers.

Why Coventry?

During the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, Cromwell sent Royalist soldiers to be imprisoned in this cathedral city in Warwickshire, England. They were shunned by the locals who didn’t want them there. This is suggested as the origin of the expression.
Another theory is that it was troops who were billeted in the town that were unwelcome and ostracised.

The phrase appears in Enid Blyton’s school stories where sending a girl to Coventry is the ultimate punishment.

Another example is Charles Dodgson, who was ‘sent to Coventry’ by the Liddell family for unknown reasons, thought people speculated that it had something to do with his relationship with young Alice.

Curfew

Clues we might use for this word include ‘Night-time outings restriction’ or ‘After-hours travel ban’ but it started as a law aimed at preventing villages burning down.

The word’s origin is in the Old French couvre-feu meaning ‘cover-fire’. In medieval times fires were precious for lighting, heating and cooking. Crude wooden houses with thatched roofs and fires burning in the hearth meant disaster was never far away. Every evening at around 8 or 9 a bell would sound as an signal that it was time to cover fires and settle in for the night, thus assuring no one went to sleep leaving their fire unguarded.

Curfew quickly came to refer to the signal itself and the benefit of restricting the population to their houses was soon seen to extend beyond avoiding destructive fire, to minimising crime and stopping schemers meeting under cover of darkness.

Curfews are now mostly put in place in times of unrest, though in some places they are imposed in order to deter juvenile delinquency.

Arms akimbo

Meaning; a stance with hands on hips and elbows turned out, usually showing impatience of defiance.
Akimbo is an old word that is only heard in this phrase, or very occasionally and more recently, as ‘legs akimbo’. A similar English example is ‘aback’ in ‘taken aback’.
In Middle English it appeared as kenebowe and is thought to come from Old Norse.
Suggested origins are the Icelandic keng-boginn, ‘bent in a horseshoe curve’; the Medieval Latin cambuca, ‘ in a crooked bow’; or the Old French kane, ‘pot’ plus the Middle English boue ‘bow’.

Argy-bargy

Meaning ‘noisy quarrelling’.
This appears to come from an earlier form ‘argle-bargle’, which originated in Scotland. The first part of the doublet is a modification of the word ‘argue’ and the second part is rhyming nonsense, similar to tittle-tattle, hoity-toity, mumbo-jumbo etc. Oxford lists the plural as ‘argy-bargles’.

Scuttlebutt

This is a wonderful slang word for gossip and we have to thank sailors for it.

Water for drinking on a ship was kept in a butt, or a large cask. The cask was scuttled, that is, a hole was cut in it usually with a hatch as a lid, which was lifted so the water could easily be scooped out of it.

Scuttle also has the meaning to sink a ship, originally this was by cutting holes in it.

In the same way that office gossip is supposed to take place around the water cooler, on board ship the sailors could take a few moments to exchange stories while having a refreshing drink at the scuttlebutt.

Scuttlebutt came to be used by sailors as slang for the gossip itself – it’s hard to imagine water cooler ever taking on the same meaning.

Fuddy-duddy

This term meaning stuffy and old-fashioned might well sound like a stuffy old-fashioned expression, but it has only been around for a short time really – well around 100 years, which is recent when you think that so much of our language has its origins in ancient times.

Like many phrases, its history is not clear. While it sounds very English, its first appearance was in America around 1890, but its origins could well go back to Scots dialect.

Duddy meant ‘ragged’ perhaps from duds meaning ordinary clothes. Fuddiel is a form of ‘fellow’ – hence we have a ragged fellow.

There were a couple of characters who appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript in the 1890s called Fuddy and Duddy but whether they were named because of an already-known phrase we do not know.

How the two words ended up together and with the meaning of an old stick-in-the mud is also unclear, but as we like to play with our language, it was probably the sound of it that was most appealing.

Bugs Bunny’s foe, Elmer Fudd was probably named with the expression in mind. He was a rather cranky and conservative character.

Wessex

We clue this variously as ‘Alfred the Great’s kingdom’, ‘Thomas Hardy’s fictional area’ or even ‘Prince Edward, Earl of …’. So what or where is Wessex? The story of Wessex is really the story of the beginning of England.

Wessex was the Kingdom of the West Saxons, founded around AD 500 by Cerdic. The kingdom grew slowly over the next 350+ years and in 871 when Alfred became king it was one of the island’s strongest kingdoms and were better able to face the marauding Danes than many others. After Alfred (who became known as ‘the Great’) defeated the Vikings at Edington, the lands were divided and Alfred was now king of the English (though there is debate about who was truly the first king of all England).

Alfred’s defeat of the Vikings led the way to the unification of England under Alfred’s grandson Athelstan and Wessex became an earldom and no longer a kingdom. After William the Conqueror’s arrival the earldom was split up.

Wessex covered most of Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, and the former county of Berkshire. The capital of Wessex was Winchester. Author Thomas Hardy, who came from Dorset, used Wessex as the fictional name for the county where his now well-known stories were set.

When Prince Edward was made Earl of Wessex the title had not been used for over 900 years. The last earl was killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Lazy Susan

What a strange name for this revolving tray in the middle of a table!

If your name is Susan I am sure you are not lazy, but you are probably interested in the origin of the name of this handy serving aid. Well, like many other English expressions, it is not clear.

The Lazy Susan is a fairly new term, replacing dumbwaiter for the turntable in the middle of a larger table. Perhaps the naming was to distinguish it from the small food elevator which saved the legs of waiters carrying food between floors, also called a dumbwaiter.

There are two theories as to who ‘Susan’ was. Firstly, it was a common name for a servant girl, who was made lazy by the device’s invention. Secondly it could have been a reference to a ‘lazy’ hostess who no longer had to offer around the selections to her guests, merely to spin the revolving tray.