I had never heard this expression so I was quite prepared to believe it was British slang acquired by the speaker when she lived in London in the 1980s. It does indeed turn out to be British English.
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I don’t know when roiling became a thing that stock markets do but they clearly have possession of the word now. The word seems to be an Anglo-French borrowing in the period of the Norman Conquest and is related to the word to roll.
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This is horribly common as a substitute for bawl one’s eyes out. Has bawl become an unfamiliar word? Do we not bawl as much as we used to? The initial meaning of the word is ‘to bark or howl like a dog’ which is essentially the meaning of the Latin word baulare from which it came.
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In the current situation it is not possible to say ‘see you soon!’ or even ‘see you later!’, and ‘stay safe!’ suddenly has a resonance with what is happening around us.
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Suddenly we were into a period of the pandemic when various shops were closing down. They were described as being shuttered. This struck me as being odd. Shops are shut in my book. Not shuttered.
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To while away the time has become to wile away the time. We starve things off instead of staving them off. And we raise shackles instead of raising hackles like the wolves in this picture.
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A breach is a hole or gap created in something and comes from Old English where it is perhaps related to the Germanic word break. It still has a literal meaning when used as a verb, so it is still possible to breach a physical obstacle of some sort. And it is from this sense that we get the whales breaching. They break through the surface of the water.
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An announcer was describing a race in two parts. He referred to as two-legged. That was said [tu-leg-uhd]. As soon as the word was out of his mouth he obviously felt uncomfortable with it.
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The recent storms brought up the phrase wreck havoc. This is a case of an unfamiliar word, wreak, being replaced by a familiar word, wreck, which seems to make sense because it is in the semantic ballpark of the concept of destruction.
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The word gorm is a variant of gaum, a dialectal word that appears in a broad range of Scottish and northern dialects, meaning ‘attention, comprehension’.
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Should you say Please excuse my being late or Please excuse me being late? To come to grips with this simple question I’m afraid I need to get a little technical and start using very old-school terms such as gerund and gerundive and gerund phrase. Please excuse my being schoolmarmish.
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I have received a nomination for the most overworked and irritating word of 2019. The nomination is for impact as a transitive verb. Whereas things used to impact on us, now they impact us.
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This is an expression that I thought was rather antiquated but which, to my surprise, is popping up with reasonable frequency, especially in political contexts. It means ‘to exaggerate or overstate’.
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These two words used to have quite distinct meanings. If two things were described as alternate, it meant that one came after another in a repetitive pattern. If something is described as alternative to another, then it is a possible option to be taken up.
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To weigh into a debate is to enter it forcefully, bringing one’s full weight of conviction into the discussion. This idiom seems to be not as common as it used to be, so that, particularly in the past tense, they weighed into the debate, weighed is being replaced by waded.
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I was alerted to the phase ball one’s eyes out when it appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. Checking online I found to my astonishment that there are thousands of examples of this. Is bawl such an unusual word now that we choose to substitute ball as more familiar?
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Don’t @ me is a phrase used in Twitter to ask people not to respond directly to the person making the tweet.
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Regardless of how you feel about the matter, is it time to stop fretting about the use of irregardless?
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There is nothing wrong with generalising parse to mean analyse but do we have to overdo it?
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I discover that it is not uncommon for people to say I was guttered rather than I was gutted. I guess the image is of being left in the gutter!
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