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In French medieval chansons de geste ‘castles in Spain’ denoted fiefs that had to be conquered from the Saracens by the knights to ‘Once in a blue moon’ is a development from ‘once in a moon’, meaning ‘once a month’, hence ‘occasionally’—‘blue’ is Originally meaning ‘person of ridicu*ous appearance’, ‘quiz’ (students’ slang, late 18th century) was jocularly derived from the Latin interrogative pronoun ‘quis’ in “Vir bonus est quis?” (“Who is a good man?”)—a good, ingenuous, harmless man being ‘To fight like Kilkenny cats’ means ‘to engage in a mutually destructive struggle’.—from the tale of two cats fighting until only their tails remained (early 19th century), which was originally meant to be nothing but amusing nonsense. The phrase ‘a pretty kettle of fish’ originally referred to a net full of fish, which, when drawn up with its contents, is suggestive of confusion, flurry and disorder—‘kettle’ being a form of ‘kiddle’, a noun denoting a dam or other barrier in a river, with First recorded circa 1629 as ‘to rain dogs and cats’, this phrase is based on a cat-and-dog fight as a metaphor for a storm or hard rain; the theory that Jonathan Swift coined the phrase is ludicrous. Read More In the phrase ‘in Di*ky’s meadow’, which means ‘in trouble’, the first element is an alteration of ‘di*ky’, meaning Se*ual puns in 17th-century English theatre explain several meanings of ‘P’s and Q’s’. In ‘Indian summer’, the adjective ‘Indian’ merely denotes something other than that normally denoted in Europe by the simple ‘TO KNOW —— LIKE THE BACK OF ONE’S HAND’ – ‘CONNAÎTRE —— COMME SA POCHE’ The Guardian, UK, 23 May 1978—used by one Lionel Bloch to designate—and denounce—the rhetoric employed by the advocates of 1974—coined by the Irish journalist John Healy with reference to the Troubles in Northern Ireland 1825, Anglo-Irish alteration of ‘by Jesus’—1867 as one word—‘the bejesus out of’ (1931) intensifies the action conveyed