Word: originating
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...editors do, however, miss a couple, such as "dive," as in a bad or dangerous restaurant or bar, and "hyper." Occasional usage notes do slip into an unpleasant pedantic style: "Careful writers use dived rather than dove in the past tense." But even less frequent notes on the origin or phrases turn up interesting information; the term "poobah," for example, a person who holds many offices at once, comes from a character in Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado...
...Rehnquist chided his brethren for not deferring to the legislature's judgment on the law's purpose. Moreover, wrote the court's leading conservative, "the Establishment Clause does not require that the public sector be insulated from all things which may have a religious significance or origin...
...giant, rapidly spinning ball of hydrogen and helium, surrounded by rings of icy debris and numerous satellites, including the largest moon in the solar system. Still, many questions remain. What are Saturn's rings made of? Can they be traced back to the solar system's origin 4.6 billion years ago, or did they evolve later from the breakup of passing objects captured by Saturn's gravity...
This was John Bartlett, the mild and scholarly proprietor of the University Book Store in Cambridge, Mass., who was asked so often about the origin of some quotation or other that he decided in 1855 to print a small (295 pages) collection that he entitled Familiar Quotations. Out this month from Little, Brown, in which Bartlett eventually became a senior partner, is the 15th edition of his little collection, the first updating in ? twelve years. Now 1,540 pages, with 22,500 quotations, it is a sockdolager, Nearly 3,000 of the quotations are new| to this edition, ranging from...
...trait that seems to transcend the change of government is antipathy for the Soviet Union. As Bing says, "All hate the Russians. All Chinese hate the Russians. It has a long origin in history...