A heckler is a person who can be found loudly interrupting a performance or speech with what he or she assumes to be hilarious or relevant commentary. The original hecklers were to be found in the textile industry, in which ‘heckling’ involved straightening out and removing the impurities from flax fibres, prior to spinning and …
Bollocks is a good old Anglo-Saxon word of Germanic origin, which is nowadays used mainly as a relatively mild swearword but technically just means ‘testicles’ (see also avocado, knacker). In both senses of the word, it somehow only sounds correct when said with a British accent. Perhaps surprisingly, the word appears in John Wycliffe’s 1382 …
From the Author of the Internationally Bestselling English Language Books – Red Herrings & White Elephants and Shaggy Dogs & Black Sheep How To Speak English Like a Native The English language is perhaps the richest and most expressive in the world. One of the reasons for this is that we have so many weird …
To Chance Your Arm is to take an uncalculated risk, where the outcome is completely unknown. A blind bet, if you like. There are several suggestions for the origin of this saying, one being that military men, whose rank was displayed in the way of stripes on their sleeves, would take battlefield risks, which could …
