Apparently a fainéant is an idler and a sluggard. Somehow you can guess that without bothering to dig out your dictionary. Fainéants sound lazy. Why? Why, dear inactive reader, did you suspect immediately that a fainéant was a lazybones, a lie-a-bed, and a lotus-eater. Perhaps it was the suggestion of faint, with …
It now appears the reason why T.S. Eliot insisted on his middle initial was because he was painfully aware of what his name would have spelled backwards without it. His great friend W.H Auden (whose H was idiopathic) wrote a palindrome on the subject: T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid …
The Holy Land, the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul in Rome, those of St James at Santiago de Compostela in Spain and St Thomas a Becket in Canterbury were great centres of medieval pilgrimage. A pilgrim was easily identified by the way he dressed. He wore a rough grey …
Despite the fact that every other shop in most cities seems to be a bloody Starbucks (or something similar), this is not a modern day occurrence.In the 17th century, London had over one thousand establishments catering to a strange new craze imported from Arabia in the early months of 1615. …
According to a popular legend, the word crap comes from Thomas Crapper, the supposed inventor of the flush toilet. The story goes that Crapper’s name was stamped on all his lavatorial devices, and when servicemen in World War I went to the latrine they would say, “I’m goin’ to the …
In Roman times an as was the name given to a small copper coin, possibly of Etruscan origin. The same word was also used to denote a ‘unit’ of weight, measure or coin. When as was borrowed into Old French in the twelfth century, it most commonly referred to ‘the …
Quintus Horatius Flaccus aka Horace was probably the world`s first autobiographer. He tells us far more about himself, his character, his peculiar foibles, and his way of life than any other great poet in antiquity. A firm believer in the ” Life is brief and death is coming, so enjoy …
Born around 50–45 BC, the Latin poet Sextus Aurelius Propertius in one of his Elegies pronounced that ‘Passion is always warmer towards absent lovers’ (Semper in absentes felicior aestus amantes). The phrase first appeared in English 1500 years later as the title of a poem by an anonymous writer. This …
Paparazzi and gossip columnists aren’t new. News sheets, pamphlets and satiric poems have been in existence for centuries, often stridently attacking the Establishment. In late 17th-century France no high-profile figure was safe from the chatty but vicious observations of French gossip Gedeon Tallemant des Reaux. His targets included the King, the …
Although the expression in its current form came first from the pen of Frederick Marryat, the idea had been around for a long time before that – but not quite as we know it. James Boswell came close when in 1769 he wrote that the ‘delicate and polite’ Mr Berenger …
