quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- wimp
- wimp: [20] The first record of the word wimp ‘feeble ineffectual person’ is from as long ago as 1920, but it was not used at all widely until the early 1960s. Its origins have never been satisfactorily explained. It is tempting to link it with J. Wellington Wimpy, a curious little man with a moustache who featured in the Popeye cartoons, but he was not around in the 1920s.
Nor is it altogether plausible that it came from American slang gimp ‘lame or handicapped person’. Perhaps the least unlikely suggestion is that it is short for whimper. No connection with the now obsolete slang wimp ‘woman’ [20] (perhaps an alteration of women) has ever been demonstrated. In the 1980s WIMP was used as an acronym for ‘weakly interacting massive particle’ and for ‘widows/icon/mouse/pointer’, a computer term.
- Chautauqua
- "assembly for popular education," 1873, from town in New York, U.S., where an annual Methodist summer colony featured lectures. The name is from ja'dahgweh, a Seneca (Iroquoian) name, possibly "one has taken out fish there," but an alternative suggested meaning is "raised body."
- feature (v.)
- 1755, "to resemble, have features resembling," from feature (n.). The sense of "make special display or attraction of" is 1888; entertainment sense from 1897. Related: Featured; featuring.
- flora (n.)
- c. 1500, "Roman goddess of flowers;" 1777, "the plant life of a region or epoch," from Latin Flora, "goddess of flowers," from flos (accusative florem, genitive floris) "flower," from *flo-s-, Italic suffixed form of PIE *bhle- "to blossom, flourish" (cognates: Middle Irish blath, Welsh blawd "blossom, flower," Old English blowan "to flower, bloom"), extended form of *bhel- (3) "to thrive, bloom," which is possibly identical with or derived from *bhel- (2) "to blow, swell" (see bole).
Her festival, the Floralia, was April 28 to May 2 and featured "comic theatrical representations" and "excessive drinking" [Century Dictionary]. The French Revolutionary calendar had a month Floréal (April 20-May 20). Used as the title of systematically descriptive plant catalogues since 1640s, but popularized by Linnaeus in his landmark 1745 study of Swedish plants, "Flora Suecica." - son of a bitch
- 1707 as a direct phrase, but implied much earlier, and Old Norse had bikkju-sonr. Abbreviated form SOB from 1918; form sumbitch attested in writing by 1969.
Abide þou þef malicious!
Biche-sone þou drawest amis
þou schalt abigge it ywis!
["Of Arthour & of Merlin," c. 1330]
"Probably the most common American vulgarity from about the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth" [Rawson].
Our maid-of-all-work in that department [indecency] is son-of-a-bitch, which seems as pale and ineffectual to a Slav or a Latin as fudge does to us. There is simply no lift in it, no shock, no sis-boom-ah. The dumbest policeman in Palermo thinks of a dozen better ones between breakfast and the noon whistle. [H.L. Mencken, "The American Language," 4th ed., 1936, p.317-8]
Elsewhere, complaining of the tepidity of the American vocabulary of profanity, Mencken writes that the toned-down form son-of-a-gun "is so lacking in punch that the Italians among us have borrowed it as a satirical name for an American: la sanemagogna is what they call him, and by it they indicate their contempt for his backwardness in the art that is one of their great glories."
It was in 1934 also that the New York Daily News, with commendable frankness, in reporting a hearing in Washington at which Senator Huey P. Long featured, forsook the old-time dashes and abbreviations and printed the complete epithet "son of a bitch." [Stanley Walker, "City Editor," 1934]
- talesman (n.)
- "reserve member of a jury," 1670s, from tales "writ ordering bystanders to serve" in place of jurors not in attendance (late 15c.), via Anglo-French (mid-13c.), from Latin tales (in tales de circumstantibus "such persons from those standing about," a clause featured in such a writ), noun use of plural of talis "such, of such kind" (see that).