A spelling bee is a competition in which contestants are challenged to spell words, a misspelled word means the contestant is eliminated. Bee is used in America to mean a gathering of people to tackle communal work, such as a quilting bee or corn husking bee. The term spelling bee …
In the doldrums is a phrase that means dispirited, feeling listless or mildly depressed. In the doldrums has a maritime origin, the Doldrums is an area in the ocean that is situated north of the equator and between two belts of trade winds. The trade winds meet in the Doldrums …
Eeny, meeny, miny, mo is the first line of a counting rhyme, used by children to decide who goes first in a game or who is the team captain or who is “it” in a game of tag. Eeny, meeny, miny, mo and other counting rhymes were passed from child …
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A rite of passage is an event, achievement or ceremony that marks a person’s passing from one stage of life to another. A rite of passage involves a change of status in one’s society. The term rite of passage comes from a French phrase first coined by the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep …
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Faint of heart describes a person who is lacking courage, squeamish, unable to rise to the occasion. An alternative phrase for faint of heart is faint at heart. Related terms are the adjective faint-hearted, the adverb faint-heartedly and the noun faint-heartedness. Faint-hearted appears in 1400, derived from faint meaning to …
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Daylight Saving Time is the practice of adjusting clock time to achieve longer evening daylight, usually in summer. Clocks are set an hour ahead in the spring, then set back an hour in the autumn. The mnemonic “Spring forward, fall back” helps those who live in Daylight Saving Time areas …
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Fly off the handle means to become enraged, especially suddenly. The phrase connotes irrationality. One who flies off the handle isn’t thinking clearly and is likely to regret it later, other verb forms are flew off the handle and flying off the handle. Fly off the handle is an American …
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A silver bullet is a magical solution to a confusing problem. Silver bullets have long had the reputation of  being the only ammunition that can kill a werewolf, since the eighteenth century. In 1933, The Lone Ranger, a fictional masked Texas Ranger who roamed the Old West with his faithful …
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To be in dire straits means to be in desperate trouble or impending danger. Dire means extremely serious. Straits are narrow passages of water which connect two larger bodies of water, navigating them may often become perilous. In the mid-sixteenth century, straits came to mean any difficult situation, one that …
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A baker’s dozen is a set of thirteen, twelve plus one more. The term baker’s dozen comes from the habit of medieval bakers tossing in an extra loaf of bread called the in-bread or vantage loaf, in orders of a dozen loaves to be sure the order did not come …