2 Greek derivatives:
‘Oxy’ which means ‘sharp’ ‘Moros’ which means ‘dull’ which are opposites.
It referrs to terms like ‘act natural’ ‘false truth’ ‘athletic scholarship’ etc.
Month: March 2010
Thomas Carlyle (1837). The French Revolution.
‘Arrestment, sudden really as a bolt out of the blue, has hit strange victims.’
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.
When the mob was running moonshine, it was required that the drivers not drink alcohol.
So, when one is On the wagon, one is not supposed to drink alcohol.
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.’