NEW FROM THE NEWSLETTER THIS WEEK
Bold as brass Mr Crosby was a lawyer and politician, a supporter of John Wilkes, who became Lord Mayor of London in 1770. He had a famous run-in with Parliament, which regarded publication of reports of their debates to ...
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Halcyon The fabled halcyon days of calm weather are traditionally the seven days each side of the winter solstice on 21 December. The story goes back to a Greek legend that the kingfisher nested in the sea at the time of ...
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Shoot one's cuffs It’s a phrase that’s relatively easy to find in dictionaries and books on idioms. All will tell you the obvious, that to shoot your cuffs is to pull or jerk your shirt cuffs out so that they project beyond the cuffs of ...
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Throw a tub to a whale The standard story of its origin is recorded in William Pulleyn’s Etymological Companion of 1853: “The Greenland vessels, and indeed the South Sea vessels, are sometimes (especially after stormy ...
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Wait Once upon a time, a wait was a watchman, a word derived from an Old Northern French word that’s related to modern German wachten, to be awake (watch, wait and wake are all linked etymologically). Early senses of the ...
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Signs for Sums We’re so familiar with the standard set of symbols for arithmetic operations that appears on every calculator keyboard that we hardly ever stop to think who created them, or when.
Considering that ...
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THE NEXT WEB SITE UPDATE
The next update is due on 10 January, when you may read about the new term Mari-fuel, look into the unusual word Candent, and discover why Capitulate and recapitulate have become so different in meaning.
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