[Adlai Stevenson/] “I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over, if that’s your decision.” [/Adlai Stevenson]
“To-morrow.” [sic]
“Ray” for any kind of radiation.
He was referring to rocket ships.
To be ‘in a Brown Study’ (meaning to be daydreaming or generally introspective)
Weird ways of expressing two-digit numbers, where they say the ones digit first, followed by the tens digit. The “Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds” nursery rhyme is a good example.
I don’t remember if it was in Robinson Crusoe or somewhere else, but I’ve read about people going a-fishing.
Roman Catholic children were encouraged to ejaculate frequently.
that is real life and maybe also in fictional accounts.
This snippet from QI is extremely relevant.
We were encouraged to write up “Spiritual Bouquets” of prayers we promised to say, and were encouraged to promise ejaculations in units of 500.
You lucked out on the penises, because I didn’t find it in the 15 minutes I looked. It will get posted when I run across it again, even when it’s months down the road. I have too much to look through, and haven’t had total recall for well over a decade. Today has been a day where I keep losing things and it’s taking hours to find the stuff.
The one I recall is one my mother picked up from her broad reading, “I beg a boon of thee.” Meaning, I am asking you for a favor.
A Penis is a Terrible Thing to Lose.
Let us know whn you find it. I’m genuinely curious to see if this usage existed independent of any body-referential intent.
Speaking of penises…
there’s a phrase “to give head” = to loose rein on a horse.
“Ice-cream” (mid 19th century)
I have seen that written as “give him his head”.
A Logic Named Joe in which a ‘logic’ is what we now call a computer.
I once read a series of short stories where a man was traveling about the galaxy in a single person ship and because ships ran so quietly there had to be a loop tape of background noise running to keep people from going crazy because it was too quiet.
“fantastic” - which I always use to mean amazing or incredible - being used to mean ridiculous, a fantasy if you will.
In the old silent film “Metropolis” they refer to the robot as a man-machine. This man-machine was the inspiration for C-3PO
I’m in the midst of reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Black Arrow” - there are many examples of oddities in the (deliberately) archaic usage.
One of my favourites is the use of ‘incontinently’ to mean without any delay.
There are other examples of someone incontinently picking up or dropping their bow, incontinently entering the room, etc.
It took me a surprisingly long time to realise that “post horses” have nothing to do with the post office.