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.’
The word was derived from the Persian language. The Egyptians used resin as one of the main ingredients in perserving their dead.
The word for resin in the Persian language is ‘mumme’. The Egyptians thought that they were referring to the perserved people, and not the resin.
The name just stuck.
A logical assumption is that ‘marshal’ is related to ‘martial,’ but the resemblance is purely coincidental. Although most French words are derived from Latin, a few result from the 3rd-century Germanic occupation of France, and the early French ‘mareschal’ is one such word. ‘Mareschal’ came from Old High German ‘marahscalc,’ formed by combining ‘marah’ (horse) and ‘scalc’ (servant). ‘Mareschal’ originally meant ‘horse servant,’ but by the time it was borrowed into Middle English in the 13th century, it described a French high royal official. English applied the word to a similar position, but it eventually came to have other meanings. By contrast, ‘martial’ derives from ‘Mars,’ the Latin name for the god of war, and is completely unrelated.