Home » Segments » Like It or Lump It

Like It or Lump It

Downton Abbey, a program featured on Masterpiece Theater, provided a handful of colorful expressions that date surprisingly far back. “Like it or lump it,” meaning “deal with it,” is found at least as early as 1830 and takes from the old verb lump meaning “to look sulky or disagreeable.” “Put that in your pipe and smoke it,” a contemporary favorite meaning “Take that!” actually shows up around 1820. As for the phrase “you’re sailing perilously close to the wind,” meaning “be careful not to overstep”– well, we haven’t caught wind of the origin of that one. This is part of a complete episode.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

More from this show

Unparalleled Misalignments

Unparalleled misalignments are pairs of phrases in which the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other, but the phrases themselves mean different things. For example, the phrase blanket statement can be paired with cover story...

Recent posts