It is very cold today and when I went out to brave the elements to get my morning paper, I heard somebody say ” it is cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” A phrase I knew well but the thought occurred… why brass and why the poor …
Did you know that there is an eighteenth-century English word for shoving live eels up a horse’s arse?. Here is the definition given in Captain Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785): FEAGUE. To feague a horse; to put ginger up a horse’s fundament, and formerly, as it is said, a …
In its oldest recorded use, a handshake signified the conferring of power from a god to an earthly ruler. This is reflected in the Egyptian verb “to give,” the hieroglyph for which was a picture of an extended hand. In Babylonia, around 1800 B.C., it was required that the king …
A fascinating early version of the Goldilocks story was written in 1837 by British poet laureate Robert Southey, under the title “Story of the Three Bears.” Southey’s Goldilocks was neither young nor beautiful; rather, she was an angry, hungry, homeless grey-haired crone, perhaps in her midsixties, who broke into the …
Yesterday I was listening to a choir sing some Renaissance madrigals on the ubiquitous Youtube channel. Among them was a song about how Italy was terribly oppressed in the sixteenth century. The country was exhorted to: Grasp, grasp, bold one, the righteous sword To avenge yourself of a thousand other …
For some unfathomable reason, I have just received an email inviting me to buy Christmas presents at a shop called Sweaty Betty, which for the uninitiated is an outlet selling fashionable sports and fitness clothes for women – in some cases so beautifully designed that customers are inspired to take …
Christmas is the season when strange men in red hats and white beards lurk and loiter in every shopping arcade. It’s therefore the time when the word misopogonistically really comes into its own. Misopogonistically is an adverb that means with a hatred of beards. Sample sentence: “No I don’t want …
You have probably gone out and after much cursing put a dead tree up in your living room. This is, if you think about it, rather strange behaviour on your part. What’s stranger is that the tree you’re buying is the Tree of Knowledge that was planted in the Garden …
It is election day in the Uk today and people on the television keep asking who is ahead in the polls. The question ‘Who’s ahead in the polls?’ is a delicious and savoury pun, because a poll is a head. Or it was. Shakespeare used poll to mean a head …
What exactly is myrrh ? The answer is that it’s a kind of aromatic resin that you get out little thorny trees in the Middle East. The reason that the Magi turned up with a bunch of the stuff is partly that myrrh was just a nice standard gift. It …
