‘Argy-bargy’ and its slightly older variant ‘argle-bargle’ have been a part of British English since the second half of the 19th century. ‘Argy’ and ‘argle’ evolved in certain English and Scottish dialects as variant forms of ‘argue.’ As far as we can tell, ‘bargy’ and ‘bargle’ never existed as independent words; they only came to life with the compounds as singsong doublings of ‘argy’ and ‘argle.’
Author: admin
“Catch-22” originated as the title of a 1961 novel by Joseph Heller. The original catch-22 in the novel was as follows: a combat pilot was crazy by definition (he would have to be crazy to fly combat missions) and since army regulations stipulated that insanity was justification for grounding, a pilot could avoid flight duty by simply asking, but if he asked, he was demonstrating his sanity (anyone who wanted to get out of combat must be sane) and had to keep flying. The label catch-22 suggested that 21 equally pernicious catches preceded it, but it was catch-22 that caught our attention and entered the language as the label for any irrational, circular and impossible situation.
‘It looks good, everything seems to be in apple pie order.’
Apparently comes from the French ‘nappes pliees’ meaning folded linen.
Categories
Apple of His Eye
In old English, the pupil of the eye was called ‘the apple.’
The pupil was thought to be spherical and solid and was the main part, or crucial part, of the eye.
16th-century English revelers toasting each other’s health sometimes drank a brimming mug of spirits straight to the bottom — drinking ‘all-out,’ they called it.
German tipplers did the same and used the German expression for ‘all out’ — ‘gar aus.’
The French adopted the German term as ‘carous,’ using the adverb in their expression ‘boire (to drink) carous,’ and that phrase, with its idiomatic sense of ‘to empty the cup,’ led to ‘carrousse,’ a French noun meaning ‘a large draft of liquor.’
And that’s where English speakers picked up ‘carouse’ in the mid-1500s, first as a noun (which later took on the sense of a general ‘drinking bout’), and then as a verb meaning ‘to drink freely.’