I’m wondering if perhaps military retirement is earlier than in the general population, as early as 46 if you joined at 18 and got plenty of construct time.*
Police and fire fighters tend to retire early as well. Is a ‘veteran’ firefighter generally assumed to be out of the game? I don’t travel enough in their circles to know.
*In the navy (at least) if you sign a four-year enlistment, then reenlist six months early when the retention chief starts hounding you, you get 4 years credit towards your 20 even though you’ve only served 3-1/2. Rinse repeat a few times and you’ve got 20 years credit after only 18 years and some months, depending on the breaks. This is not for some reason as construct time.
And that’s if you actually retire from the military. Far more common is someone who signs up for a two- or four-year stint, then leaves and goes on to some other career. They’re considered veterans, too.
Jealous used to mean “protective or vigilant of one’s possessions.” As an example, let’s say Bob owns a coin collection that he highly values and will never part with. We might say, “Bob is jealous of his coin collection.” But somewhere along the way the word morphed into a synonym for envious.
True, but isn’t that almost a fossil idiom, or whatever it’s called, where the archaic sense of “fair” has survived only in that specific phrase? Perhaps not quite, because there are multiple phrases - “fair maiden”, perhaps a few others. But I don’t think it’s commonly used nowadays as a standalone word to mean beautiful.
ETA: incidentally, here’s a wiki listing dozens of them, interesting reading and somewhat relevant to the OP.
A veteran firefighter, police officer etc is a police officer/firefighter who has been doing that for a long time and is still doing so. A retired police officer/firefighter is just that - even if they retired at 40ish.
Used to be an “office” wasn’t a place as much as it was what we would now call a “job.” It still exists in that sense, but only in the sense of an electing office. We speak of a politician seeking office, but we don’t say anymore “I’d like an office” unless you’re talking about a physical place.
I used to work at Old Swinford Hospital, which is a school, not a medical facility. It takes its name from the old use of the word hospital to mean a place where you could be a guest. So a boarding school, almshouses and medical places were all known as hospitals.
Whenever we took the kids on school trips people were always amazed at how healthy they looked!
Interestingly, it’s one of the few schools in the UK to have its own morgue following a cholera outbreak in the 1700’s.
It’s not just any old job , but it’s also not limited to elected positions. It’s also used for appointed positions such as Secretary of State and also for the head of a college or university. For the non-elected positions, you won’t see “seeking office” but you will see “assumed office " or " In Office September 2001 - July 2011”
There’s also “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?”, and Eris’ apple engraved “For the fairest”. Not as common as it used to be, maybe, but far from fossilized.
The original meaning was “knotted”. The sexual meaning originally referred specifically to bondage.
To be clear, the “fossilized” part isn’t implying that the idiomatic phrase is out of date. Just the opposite - the analogy with fossilization is that a word that is no longer used a standalone word is “preserved” in the (still current) idiom.
Having said that, I agree that “fair” is probably best described as a transitional case, since it’s present in so many current phrases.
Talent was originally just a measure of weight, then of money (for its weight of precious metal). Now it is a description of particular skill or ability.
And that drives me nuts, but people truly don’t get the difference. When I say “I’m envious” in a complimentary way, they feel sorry for me. I’ve even heard “I’m not envious, I’m jealous!”
I thought of a very recent fossil. OK, that sounds like an oxymoron. What I mean is a word that’s fossilized within the memory of living people.
Bully as an adjective, meaning “good” or “excellent”. When’s the last time you heard someone use that? But it survives in the phrase “bully pulpit”, which T Roosevelt famously used to describe the Presidency.
Way back in the 1960s, there was a commercial which had an older man say to a kid “bully for your mommy”. I can’t recall the product, but the phrase went virial for a couple months. But even then it sounded somewhat old fashioned.
At the time the US was founded, democracy was synonymous with mob rule, and was viewed with suspicion. The founders emphasized “republican government” instead.
Now, we view democracy as a reference to a representative system akin to their republican terminology. And, of course, the term republican has clearly adopted a specific, partisan ideology.
