When Ana first arrived in the United States from Hungary, she was taken aback when someone greeted her with the idiomatic expression How’s it hanging?. She was also puzzled by the expression trim the tree meaning to “adorn a Christmas tree with decorations.” Trim in this sense reflects the word’s much earlier sense, meaning “to prepare” something. If you trim the sail on a boat, for example, you adjust it to prepare it for new conditions. If you’re in good trim you’re in good physical condition, and an ideal military force will be in fighting trim. The word trim is a contranym, meaning it can have one of two opposite meanings, namely, “to subtract from” or “to add to.” Cleave and dust are two other examples of contranyms. 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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