The word petard refers to a type of bomb or mine once used to break down walls and gates.
To be hoist is to be blown up.
Therefore, to be hoist by one’s own petard is to be, literally or figuratively, blown up by one’s own bomb.
The old saying waiting till the cows come home is almost 400 years old. It refers to the early-morning hour when cows line up at the farm gates, ready to be milked.
Say it whichever way you like. The pronouns those and them are both correctly used as objects in this passage.
There are several theories. One is that the phrase refers to greased-pig contests once held at county fairs, where the winner kept the pig and thus brought home the bacon. Another theory revolves around the town of Dunmon, England. There, in A.D. 1111, a noblewoman decreed that any person who knelt at the church door…
It derives from the Latin nescius, or “ignorant,” which comes from nescire, or “not to know.” In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the phrase a nice person connoted foolishness rather than agreeableness. Over the years, however, nice has gained its more favorable, if bland, connotation.
The male side of a family is called the Spear side. A distaff was a stick with a cleft end, used to hold the flax or wool from which a woman spun thread. The distaff was considered a woman’s tool, while the spear was a man’s. Both ways of describing genealogy are now rarely used.
Yes, Dr. Thomas Lushington (1590-1661), an English chaplain who liked his liquor. The City of Lushington, a London drinking club, may have borrowed its name from him. In the nineteenth century, the City of Lushington in turn became the source of the word lush, originally a slang term for beer and eventually another word for…