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Show THE ORIGIN OF SOME ANCIENT EXPRESSIONS. The word "Hurrah" is pure Slovenian and is commonly heard from the coast of Dalmatia to Behring's [Bering's] Straits when any of the population living within these limits are called on to give proof of courage and valor. The origin of the word belongs to the primitive idea that every man that dies heroically for his country goes straight to heaven "Hurray" (to paradise) - and in the shock and ardor of battle the combatants utter a cry, as the Turks do that of "Allah?" each animating himself by the certitude of immediate recompense to forget earth and to contempt death. "SHEBANG," which sometimes means a hut?, sometimes a low place of immortal resort, originated with the pupils of Yale College, New Haven, who used it to indicate their rooms or a public hall fitted up for some theatrical or other performance. It was never English. "A little bird told me," comes from Ecclesiastes x, 20 [Chapter 10 Verse 20]- "For a bird in the air shall carry the voice, and that which has wings shall tell the matter." Such phrases as "He was beset with duns" "He was dunned for money that he owed" are often used. Horne Took says that dun came from came from the Anglo Saxon dynan and the Icelandic dyn, and that "a dun is one who had dinned another for money or anything else." Another idea is that dun comes from the French, where donnez means "give me," and that it is a demand for something due. Another derivation, plainer and more matter-of-fact, is that in the reign of Henry VII, there was a noted bailiff in the city of Lincoln, named Joseph Dunn, so extremely active, so dexterous in the management of his rough business that it became a saying when a man refused or neglected to pay his debts "Why don't you Dunn him?" - that is, "Why don't you send Dunn to arrest him?" In time the word dun came to have a general rather that a local acceptation. Francis Bacon used it about a century after it originated in Lincoln, as follows: AI shall be dunning thee every day." And Phillips said, "A dun horrible master! hated by gods and men." "COUNT THEIR CHICKENS ere?(not before)they're hatched" is taken from Samuel Butler's "Hudibras" aimed at the Puritans of Charles I, by whom was founded the British Republic, of which Oliver Cromwell was lord protector for several years until his death in 1658. "NOT MUCH the worse of wear" (not none) was written by William Cowper, an English poet, who was born in 1731 and died in 1800. "THOUGH THIS may be play to you, tis death to us" was written by Roger ?trange in 1704. "NO NEW thing under the Sun" can be found in Ecclesiastes I., 9 [Chapter 1, verse 9]. ??? escaped with the skin my teeth" ??? .29. ??? [illegible lines] ?ELL DONE??? translation ??? fragment of Euripides, the Greek poet, and was first brought to notice by being left on the table of a Cambridge undergraduate who shot himself in his room nearly two centuries ago. "COMING events cast their shadows before" was literally dreamed by Thomas Campbell, author of the "Pleasures of Hope," who woke up one night repeating it, and introduced it into "Lochiel's Warning" one of the most striking of his minor poems. - Troy (N.Y.) Times. |