Tag archives: phrases
Paris in the spring
To celebrate the publication of OUP’s new bilingual Compact dictionaries in May, we are featuring a series of blog posts regarding French, Spanish, Russian, German, and Italian over the coming weeks. In this first post, Joanna Rubery considers the far-reaching effects of Parisian culture, including French words to be heard in the streets of South [...]
Cat idioms and expressions
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, it was perhaps with the intention of enhancing international communication, and making the workplace more efficient – useful things of that nature. What he perhaps did not expect is what seems to be the web’s [...]
Footprints in the butter: an homage to elephants in the English language
On April 13, 1796, an elephant set foot on American soil for the first time. Although accounts vary, this elephant has been identified with Old Bet, who became a national sensation as the main attraction of Hackaliah Bailey’s circus. Outside the Elephant Hotel in Somers, N.Y., built by Bailey and named after his star performer, [...]
Horseplay: horses in idioms and proverbs
Horses have been in the news recently and, as with anything topical and a little bit scandalous, would-be comedians have been riffing on horse-related puns and quips to their hearts’ content. The English language is not new to this sort of play with the word ‘horse’. Horseplay, if you will – which is a case [...]
Yobs over the moon about burying the hatchet: popular idioms explained
Why do we bury the hatchet? This phrase, meaning to end an argument or conflict, refers back to a Native American custom in the seventeenth century whereby a hatchet or tomahawk (the axe of the North American Indians, used as a weapon of chase and war) would be buried in the ground to signal […]
Rigger-jiggers, feathers, and crabs: the language of rowing
Every November Oxford’s Isis river is overrun with novice crews and coxes trying to win their first race, the Christ Church Regatta. Rowing is a huge part of student life here, underlined rather explicitly in this apt quotation which features in the entry for rowing in the Oxford English Dictionary: “Rowing was more than a [...]
Relatively speaking: an untangling of that/who/which
I have a twofold career: as well as writing blogs about grammar and usage, I also teach English as a foreign language. Explaining the more arcane and sometimes illogical nuances of English grammar to native and non-native speakers alike can be challenging, but I relish the chance to do so. I’ve found that some people [...]
Why is something that is the very best known as ‘the bee’s knees’?
This curious expression is one of many similar sayings for something that is the acme of excellence. We are all familiar with the cat’s whiskers (or the cat’s pyjamas, the cat’s meow, and the cat’s nuts), which originated in the roaring 1920s and which might well have been the first of its kind—it is said [...]
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