When did the expression have a crush on someone come into use? The television series Downton Abbey has dropped this and other fun bits of language, but no need to worry about its historical accuracy — crush has been around since the early 1880s. To...
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s witches’ knickers! What do you call stray plastic bags that litter the landscape? Also, what it means to do something like a boss, how to hyphenate correctly, and why we say we have a crush on...
If a lady is no better than she ought to be, her sexual morals may be in question. The saying, recently popularized by the BBC program Downton Abbey, is what’s known as a charientism, or a bit of sugar-coated snark. By the way, if you’d...
In this week's episode, we go from hip-hop to a public television show about the intra- and inter-class conflicts in a British manor house. We also talk about "flupgrades," what you might call it when a software update...
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...
