Category Archives: Words, phrases & expressions

It’s Friday 13th: a day for paraskevidekatriaphobia, friggatriskaidekaphobia or triskaidekaphobia

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frigga

Reposting this, on this auspicious day …

It’s Friday 13th, and for some people that’s a day when their triskaidekaphobia kicks in big time. Triskaidekaphobia? It means “fear of the number 13”. Also sometimes spelled triskaidecaphobia, it’s a slightly strange word deriving from two different languages: it combines the Greek treiskaideka (“thirteen”) with the Latin word for “fear of”, phobia. The first known written citation is in a book by Isador Coriat, Religion and Medicine: the Moral Control of Nervous Disorders, published in 1908, so this superstition linked to the number 13 is probably quite a recent phenomenon. But is there also a word for the fear of the date itself? Continue reading →

In the news: a linguistic Brexit? (“French leave”)

Exactly a year after the historic Brexit referendum, a British MP looks likely to achieve her goal of seeing another major change in citizenship in Europe — in a popular English expression. A bill has been steered through Parliament by the Conservative MP for Anglebury, Avril Berner, who has called for the expression “French leave” — meaning “absence from work or duty without permission” (OED) — to be changed to “English leave” in dictionaries and school textbooks throughout the UK. In a four-page document, which was reported by Parliament Today to have reached Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s signature on Thursday, the anniversary of the landmark 2017 vote, Berner argued that the word French has no business holding its place in standard British English, especially as the island nation continues to negotiate its economic and legal separation from the European mainland. Interestingly, the French equivalent for the phrase is “filer a l’anglaise” — meaning literally “to leave English-style”. The nearly 250-year-old phrase “French leave” is first recorded in 1771.

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Other English terms that contain the names of European nationalities are:

  • Spanish fly: an aphrodisiac, made from the dried blood of Spanish beetles
  • Dutch cap: a contraceptive diaphragm
  • French letter: another contraceptive, a condom

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Celebrating seven on Glosso’s seventh birthday

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It’s the number of wonders in the world; for many, it’s the number of perfection, security, safety and rest. It’s the number of colors in a rainbow and of days in a week; of notes in a scale, and of dwarfs in Snow White’s entourage.

Here, on Glosso’s seventh birthday, are seven phrases or proverbs that include the word seven — plus one for luck.

  • Seven-day wonder: A person or thing that generates interest for only a short amount of time.
  • At sixes and  sevens: Frazzled or disorganized. Probably originated from a dice game in which rolling a six or seven was unfavorable.
  • Seven-year itch: A supposed tendency to infidelity after seven years of marriage.
  • In seventh heaven: In a state of ecstasy.
  • Seven-league boots:  The ability to travel very fast on foot. This phrase comes from the fairy-tale Hop o’ My Thumb (or Little Thumbling), in which magic boots enable the wearer to travel seven leagues in each stride.
  • “Keep a thing seven years and you’ll (always) find a use for it“
  • “You should know a man seven years before you stir his fire“

And the last one for luck:

Twenty-four seven: All day every day …

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A glossary of colors

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rainbow

“Dream when you’re feeling blue”, sang Ray Charles. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra talked famously of her salad days when she was “green in judgement”; the Everley Brothers sang of all their friends being “just about green with envy”. Depeche Mode wrote a whole song about a black day, and Cyndi Lauper saw someone’s “true colors shining through”. The poetic use of color in a metaphorical rather than a literal sense — to describe everything from moods to bank-balances, political affiliations to social classes — dates back centuries and permeates most modern languages. Colors themselves have metaphorical meanings that are universal across cultures and languages. Here’s a summary of their figurative meanings, which are often evoked as keenly and understood as universally as the hues they describe literally. Continue reading →

“You said you wanted a smoking gun; how about a smoking proverb?”

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That’s a line out of Manhunt: Unabomber, the gripping new(ish) TV series about how a notorious serial killer was tracked down and apprehended, largely thanks to the relatively young science known as “forensic linguistics.” If you want to know what forensic linguistics is all about, watch this series. (And read Glossophilia’s earlier post about another famous crime in which this particular form of detective work played an important role.) For a quick taster of the series, and to see how linguistics came into the crime in question, watch the video clip below to discover how a common proverb was the key to cracking the case of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Which proverb was it, and how did its history help the FBI to solve the case? Continue reading →

“Bombogenesis”, “bomb cyclone”: new words for a new reality

A Nor’easter / Wikimedia Commons

It’s not just any old Nor’easter heading towards America’s east coast today. It’s a “bomb cyclone,” folks. That’s another name for a word that most of the world has learned in the last 48 hours. Mashable first coined the phrase “bomb cyclone” as a more punchy  synonym for the meteorological term bombogenesis. But what the nor’easter is a bombogenesis? Continue reading →