Also, something that is flimsy or not strong is often called "Weak tea." Example: "We already have laws on the books covering that." "Yes, but those laws are weak tea. We need something much stronger." Tea seems to be used as the liquid version of whitebread or vanilla, meaning bland.
Would the modern slang opposite of weak tea be awesomesauce? Nope, not quite. It doesn't mean strong, only awesome.
"Tea Sipper" sounds like the Texas equivalent of the Skyrim expression, "Milk Drinker" (i.e. someone who is weak, young, or inexperienced). Definitely an insult. If women were expected to drink tea, what about coffee? Or hot chocolate?
I'd wager that that was where the word "teetotaler" as a word for a sober person came from. Which brings us to 'milquetoast" as an expression of a passive unassuming person. It came from a name of a comic strip character, and the reference was to something easily digesttble and therefore completely inoffensive, at least for people who weren't lactose intolerant.
From dictionary.com (Word origins of "teetotal"): Not sure what the "tee" is doing there. Maybe this mysterious R. Turner was thinking of golf?
Um, no. To quote from google: "The term D-Day is used by the Armed Forces to refer to the beginning of an operation. The 'D' stands for 'Day', meaning it's actually short for 'Day-Day' (which is nowhere near as catchy)." In the same way, the "H" in "H-Hour" stands for "Hour". So if "teetotal" followed that rule, it would mean "total-total".
Here's a thought. The word "awful" originally meant "awe-inspiring" (i.e. "awe-full"). The Grand Canyon is awful. So, is it possible for the word "artful" to mean "full of art"? The picture gallery was artful.
A heart is the muscular organ of the circulatory system that pumps blood. But I was thinking today of all the ways we use the word "heart" - and that sent me to etymology online. Shakespeare was the first one (circa 1600) to use the expression "take to heart." "Bleeding heart" - meaning a "person liberally and excessively sympathetic" - came later - attested by 1936 in the work of popular conservative newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler (1894-1969), who first used it in reference to his own feelings about the Republican Party but by 1938 regularly deployed it against the Roosevelt administration and also as a modifier (bleeding-heart liberal) Heart attack attested from 1875; heart disease is from 1864. The card game hearts is so called from 1886. To have one's heart in the right place "mean well" is from 1774. Heart and soul "one's whole being" is from 1650s. To eat (one's own) heart "waste away with grief, resentment, etc." is from 1580s.
Hmm, and yet the phrase "eat your heart out!" nowadays implies that the other person should be jealous, not grieving. "Check out my new car! Eat your heart out, Steve!" I learned a new word today: onager. This is what people often mistakenly refer to as a catapult, but an onager is, more precisely, a type of catapult. The catapult is much older, dating back to the 7th century BC, but the onager is more precise, and dates to about 4 centuries later, created by - no surprise - the Romans, master engineers (and occasionally evil bastards) that they were. This siege engine hurled rocks at your enemy's walls. Of course, if someone was standing on the parapet and beneath the incoming rock ... *SPLAT.* The Romans had other types of siege weapons, like the scorpion and the ballista, for clearing out walls, as well as battering rams and siege towers. City defenders were hardly defenceless, but if the Romans were on the horizon, it was usually prudent to surrender at once. If you defied a besieger and then lost, the consequences were ... not pretty. So why is it called an "onager"? The name literally means "wild donkey", which refers to the Syrian wild donkey (known in Latin as onagrum), and which was native to the eastern parts of the empire. The name is derived from the kicking action of the machine that threw stones into the air, which resembled the kicking action of the hooves of the wild donkey.
Speaking of donkeys... that thing that artists perch their canvases on is an "easel." Which comes from the German word "Esel" which means "donkey."
Fun fact - the word "hag" and the word "haggard" or not etymologically related despite both evoking a similar image.
I just learned a new word, thanks to a book I'm reading at the moment - "Sicily: A History" by John Julius Norwich. enfeoff, verb. (under the feudal system) give (someone) freehold property or land in exchange for their pledged service. "I served the old Duke for 7 years in his army, and he enfeoffed me this 'ere farm!"
Here's another new word: picaresque (of a novel). A form of novel popular in earlier centuries but disapproved of by the formalists. At its base it is a string of adventures with no major character changes, like most TV series. Don Quixote was a picaresque novel in its first volume. Then someone wrote a bad fanfic of it and Cervantes was so annoyed that he wrote the second volume, which had character development, trashed the imitator, and killed the main character so he couldn't be used again. (This was long before the invention of the prequel.) One might consider that Sherlock Holmes is also a picaresque character, as he hardly changes and gets killed off (but resurrected later). HHGTTG is also a picaresque novel (or series of them).
In this age of the internet, we see a lot of words from one country adopted by another, especially English words shared between the UK and the US. In the early 20th century, “Britishisms” were transferred by military conflict – from the British Tommy to the American G.I. Joe – and then took hold with the wider American public, words like: gadget … cushy … bonkers … dicey … shambolic Lynne Murphy, a linguist at the University of Sussex, in her study of online lists explaining British terms to Americans and vice versa, found: “Gobsmacked!” Americans are chuffed as chips at British English
For centuries, France legally and culturally resisted incursions of English terms into French. Perhaps modern British English speakers have embraced this (ironically enough) French concept of linguistic purity re: American English while American English speakers continue the tradition so aptly expressed by Canadian James D. Nicoll: "We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
That's not wrong. It's just American shorthand for: It is possible that I could care less, but I can't imagine how.
People like that clearly don't understand logic. If you could care less, then you do care now, however little. If you didn't care at all, you wouldn't bother to deny that you care. And if you can't imagine how you could care less, perhaps you need a more creative and vivid imagination.
