Damn Your Eyes!

Samuel Beckett provides an endless font of archaic phrases in his novels and a bit of dialogue in Murphy provided the relatively ancient expression: "damn your eyes".

The etymology for this phrase is vacuous on teh interwebs, as it seems to be a folk expression. I did find an early origin when STERNE Tr. Shandy III. xii. 64 (1761) stateth: - From the great and tremendous oath of William the Conqueror, (By the splendour of God) down to the lowest oath of a scavenger, "Damn your eyes".

The 'eyes' addition to 'damn you(r)' is a synecdoche encompassing the cursed.

Employ it thusly:

"I told you not to use my pots and pans, damn your eyes!"

hoity-toity

My biggest gripe with the word 'pretentious' is that it is, itself, a pretentious word! Hoity-toity is the answer - you can't say it with a straight face AND it conveys that you 'operate outside of the entire economy of pretense and authenticity' (what a hoity toity thing to say!). Now that I live in melbourne I have so many more opportunities to use this phrase, and I'm going to do my best to make the most of every single one of them!

Snopes has a writeup on why it has nothing to do with the french

thanks Tom.

"Dance with the one that brought you"

a modern update could be "dance with the one that bought you drugs"

via Ken Thompson's turing award lecture, via Royce

As nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs

Self-explanatory

Bibulous

(from wiktionary)

Adjective

bibulous (comparative more bibulous, superlative most bibulous)

1. very absorbent
2. given to or marked by the consumption of alcohol

When I was given the 'New Generation Washcloth' below, I assumed some bored sweatshop packaging designer had taken to inventing new words. I was wrong! Turns out there's large swaths of China where they learnt English from turn-of-the-century (no, the OTHER century) dictionaries. Although now that I think about it, it's just as likely there's some cynical Oxford lit grad expat receiving a hefty commission for having figured out how to monetize the desire to laugh at foreigners. Either way, I think it's time 'bibulous' made its triumphant re-entry into popular lexicon!

Font of Information

Today I was chatting with a Mexican I met on omegle.com, and he told me that a band was touring Australia soon. He promptly withdrew his assertion, citing a "bad font of information". At first I thought he'd made a mistake with google translate, but it turns out a font can be more than just something you wank about while pretending to be a graphic designer, or something you dunk a baby in. He'd uttered the very first ARCHAIC PHRASE OF THE DAY. Thankyou, Afonso!