Dan from Jacksonville, Florida, grew up in south Louisiana, where speakers of Cajun French say garde de donc! to mean “Well, would you look at that!” or “Can you believe this?” The phrase is used to point out something foolish or surprising. The same idea may be rendered as mais garde donc or garde donc or garde mais donc, the garde coming from the French word meaning “look at” and the donc meaning “there.” It’s unrelated to the term gaga, which originates in French hospital slang gâteux, referring to someone who lacks all their faculties. This is part of a complete episode.
If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
There are many proposed origins for the exclamation of surprise, holy Toledo! But the most likely one involves not the city in Ohio, but instead Toledo, Spain, which has been a major religious center for centuries in the traditions of both Islam and...
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