‘She thinks I must always be at her beck and call.’ Earl of Worcester (1470).
The original meaning of beck:
Julius Caesars Commentaryes – ‘It should be ready at a beck.’ (A beck was a silent signal, like the nod of the head).
Tag: british
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Come What May
Shakespeare (1606) – Macbeth
‘Come what come may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day.’
Derived from one of the worst prisons in England: the Clink Prison. The Clink Prison was the home of some of the most unthinkable tortures in Medieval times.
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Attic
The term was plundered from the Greeks with the 18th Century revival of the era in British architecture with the triangular roofs.
The space that was immediately underneath the roof was thus termed for the mimicked architecture on the peninsula of Attica.
‘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.’