Wordwizard

Yes, it's that too, but that is a separate (though not entirely unrelated) sense of the word.

I have an uncle with some experience of by-parse operations.

Er... WoZ, the banana is a herb, not a grass, and belongs to a family of its own (Musaceae) that is different from the grasses (Graminaceae).

I don't think there's any mystery about the origin of this expression, Robert. As Ken has already stated, 'bejabbers', 'bejebees' and 'bejesus' all derive from 'By Jesus!' and are what is known as 'minced [i.e. mealy-mouthed or euphemised] oaths'. These arose at a time when many people regarded it a...

My Chambers 20th C Dictionary gives 'dystopian' as the adjectival form of 'dystopia' (which it defines as 'a place thought of as the opposite to Utopia, i.e. where everything is as bad as possible'). My Websters New Universal Unabridged also has 'dystopian'. So it appears that Whitehead used the med...

Ken,

Many, many thanks for taking the trouble to demonstrate both your methodology and your sources in such detail. Your information will be immensely helpful on every level to those wishing to undertake similar research.

Thanks once again!

The fact that the experiment conducted by Watts using email instead of postal mail indicated that an average of five intermediaries was required to connect any two people in 2001 strongly suggests to me that Karinthy and Milgram must have been quite wrong at the time that they hypothesised just six ...

It is a preposition.

I recall the shag grass of the '70s. How much fun we had in it depended on the kind of company we were keeping.

In John Bull's quote above, I assume that 'sowre crud' is what we today would call 'sauerkraut', literally 'sour cabbage' or 'sour greens' in German. In this connection my Websters New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (WNUUD) states that 'crud' began life as a Middle English word between 1325-1375, a...

Steve, where did that snippet come from?

Thanks, Ken -- that's most kind of you.

Ross, is your paper viewable online anywhere? One of the etymologist's perennial bugbears is the emergence of spurious word provenances, so it would be fascinating to gain an insight into how your culture has prevented similar processes from diluting and distorting the understanding of its past.

I have heard this expression used by a number of people in the Berkshire/Oxfordshire area of England more or less until the present day, but only in vulgar reference to gypsies. So it certainly did not lapse in 1955 or even the early 1960s, as was suggested by some sources above.

Ken, like many of us who visit Wordwizard, I am as impressed as Ashley is by the customary thoroughness of your research, so my interest was aroused by your brief outline of your modus operandi . I doubt I am the only person who would like to be able to follow the train of one of your etymological i...