My eight year old asked what the nap in kidnap means and I had absolutely nothing. It clearly isn't sleeping. Then she asked whether napkin is the same nap, which felt like a reasonable guess and I suspect is a…
I looked up a slang term I've heard my whole life and the dictionary gave a first citation in the 1920s, which is clearly much later than it must have existed. Then I noticed the same gap on several other entries. Is…
Someone at work stated flatly that rule of thumb comes from an old law permitting a man to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb, and that everyone should stop using the phrase. It gets repeated a lot but…
The version I've heard three times now is that Roman sculptors filled cracks in marble with wax, so honest work was sine cera, without wax, and that gave us sincere. It's a lovely story and it has the shape of something…
I've fallen down a hole on this one. Depending on where I look, OK is a joke abbreviation from 1830s Boston, a Choctaw word, a West African import, or a shortening of a Scots phrase, and each source states its version…