Soft or enviable situation.
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love. ‘Come live with me and be my love….And I will make thee beds of roses.’
Mar 07
Everyday, Life, Literary No Comments
out-of-sight was Bowery slang for astonishingly excellent in the 1890s.
It was used by Stephen Crane at least four times in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (New York: 1893).
Visiting a museum, our heroine utters, ‘Dis is outa sight.’ She could have been speaking 70 years later.
Mar 07
Life, Literary, Oddities australian, english, scottish No Comments
An imaginary place
The phrase ‘never-never land’ is linked to a creation of the Scottish playwright Sir James Barrie. In Barrie’s play Peter Pan, first produced in 1904, Peter befriends the real-world children of the Darling family and spirits them off for a visit to Never Land, where children can fly and never have to become adults. In his 1908 play When Wendy Grew Up, Barrie changed the name to Never Never Land, perhaps influenced by already existing ‘never-never’ terms, such as Australia’s ‘never-never country’ (for its sparsely populated desert interior). Even before that, however, people had already begun to refer to a place that was overly idealistic or romantic as a ‘never-never land.’
Mar 04
substitution of a word for a word with a similar sound, in which the resulting phrase makes no sense but often creates a comic effect
Named after the character Miss Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals, a malapropism is any well-intended saying that takes on a different and often ludicrous meaning when a similar yet utterly inappropriate word is used. To wit: ‘He is the very pineapple of politeness.’
Mar 04
If you embellish enough, somebody is going to believe some of it
T. Hall (1660): Funebria Flore. – “If you throw enough dirt against the wall, some of it is bound to stick.”
Mar 04
Literary british, english No Comments
Untrustworthy
Harington (1618) Epigrams: ‘That he might scant trust him so farre as throw him.’
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