Stuff your grandma says
cottage industry
— a phrase surprisingly applied recently to lawyers benefiting from the victims of Harvey Weinstein. ‘Sexual harassment settlements had swelled into a cottage industry,’ said New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey in their new book about the Weinstein scandal. It used to mean people earning a little money in their homes for sewing or jarring pickles.
Some cottage. Some industry.
Cut and paste
Gather round, children, while I tell you of the days when editors changing stories used to take a pair of scissors and cut a paragraph or a sentence. Then they’d get out a gluepot (look it up) and swab the back of this tiny curling piece of paper, getting goo on their fingers, and paste it onto the story where it made more sense. In the 1970s a computer scientist named Larry Tesler invented the software that lets you move words without scissors or goo. Count yourselves lucky, children, except for the fact there were a lot more jobs editing stories in the olden days.
Cut me some slack
It’s a commonly used modern expression that comes from eighteenth-century sailing, when a sailor requested some slack in the sail rope. The ‘quit giving me grief’ aspect of the expression is much older, from the 1300s, when ‘slack’ meant pain, either physical or spiritual.
long johns
Called ‘long underwear’ by those under 40 if they have any idea what we’re describing. I’m wearing a silk pair now because in Toronto it’s minus 21 degrees Celsius with the wind chill. A centuries-old company in England developed warm under-clothing wear named after the 19th-century boxer John Sullivan, although they’re no use to him now.
Drawing a blank
These days it means “I’ve searched my memory and found nothing,” or, “was not successful,” as in a Peter Wimsey novel: “By twelve o’clock, Miss Climpson decided that she had drawn a blank at the Central tea shop.” The phrase has contradictory origins. One is from the blank bullets that save your noggin in Russian roulette; the other comes from useless lottery tickets in sold in the Middle Ages.
In 1812 American editor Charles Miner wrote, “When I see a merchant over-polite to his customers, thinks I, that man has an axe to grind.” It means to have a hidden agenda. Axes, commonly heavy wooden blades attached at right angles to wooden handles, were essential to chopping wood — once the only way you could heat your house. Although we heat with a furnace, we still have my father’s axe in our garage, and I use it to cut down the firewood handily delivered and stacked every fall by a local service for a fee that would make my father keel over. Keel: to capsize, as in a boat. Sometimes Grandma’s stuff gets murkier and murkier. Murk: oh, never mind.
Going to hell in a handbasket
- means heading for disaster. It's presumed to refer to the baskets placed under guillotines to catch the results of an execution. Yuck.