ShopWords And Phrases
A list of commonly used words and phrases and their origins. Please make a selection below:- "Time is money"
- 'Hell bent' or 'Hell for leather'
- A-tishoo
- Alarm
- Alphabet
- Ammonia
- Ampersand
- An even break
- Argy-bargy
- Arms akimbo
- As dead as a doornail
- At one fell swoop
- Back to square one
- Bedlam
- Beyond the pale
- Big
- Canary
- Codswallop
- Codswallop
- Colossus
- Cravat
- Crisscross
- Curfew
- Curry favour
- Dollar
- Dressed to the nines
- Earwig
- Electricity
- Fiasco
- Flavour of the month
- Frog in your throat
- From the horse's mouth
- Fuddy-duddy
- God bless you!
- Grog
- Hat trick
- Kangaroo court
- Keep your shirt on!
- Kick the bucket
- Kowtow
- Lazy Susan
- Let the cat out of the bag
- Limerick
- Mad as a hatter
- Mind your P's and Q's
- Money
- OK - Okay
- Orient
- Pagan
- Posh
- Quackery
- Quiz
- Raining cats and dogs
- Red Herring
- Rickshaw
- Rookie
- Scuttlebutt
- Send to Coventry
- Seventh Heaven
- Shampoo
- Show a Leg
- Sideburns
- Soccer
- The Real McCoy
- Toff
- Ventriloquism
- Zany
Toff
Last modified on 2012-05-02 01:15:02 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
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
Last modified on 2012-03-09 03:05:23 GMT. 1 comment. Top.
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
Last modified on 2012-03-05 00:56:20 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
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
Last modified on 2012-02-29 22:17:52 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
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
Last modified on 2012-01-31 05:08:09 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
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’.
