A Certain Blue Enters…

Dec 30, 2019

Fun With Words

All of the info in this post comes from The Weird World of Words by Mitchell Symons.

Word of the Day: Rowel – the revolving star on the back of a cowboy’s spurs.

Changed their meaning over time: Nice: originally meant “foolish” or “silly”

Phrases first invented or popularized by William Shakespeare:

• ‘Dead as a doornail’ – Henry VI, Part 2
• ‘Eaten me out of house and home’ – Henry IV, Part 2
• ‘Elbow room’ – King John
• ‘Give the devil his due’ – Henry IV, Part1
• ‘Hoist with his own petard’ – Hamlet

Spitting Image

This phrase is a result of a mispronunciation of a perfectly intelligible phrase. The original phrase? ‘Spirit and image’. And it was said when a boy behaved and looked like his father, particularly in the southern states of the U.S. It’s not hard to see how ‘spirit and image’ became ‘spitting image’!

Tongue Twisters:

• Black back bat.
• Wunwun was a racehorse, tutu was one too. Wunwun won one race, Tutu one one too.

Newspaper Headline

‘Statistics show that teen pregnancy drops off significantly after age 25’

Hope you have a great day!

Thanks for stopping by!!