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Sam Hill is an American English slang phrase, a euphemism or minced oath for "the devil" or "hell" personified (as in, "What in the Sam Hill is that?"). Etymologist Michael Quinion and others date the expression back to the late 1830s; [1] [2] they and others [3] consider the expression to have been a simple bowdlerization, with, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, an unknown origin.
A proverbial phrase or expression is a type of conventional saying similar to a proverb and transmitted by oral tradition. The difference is that a proverb is a fixed expression, while a proverbial phrase permits alterations to fit the grammar of the context. [1] [2] In 1768, John Ray defined a proverbial phrase as:
The earliest known text resembling this phrase occurs in Virgil's Aeneid: "facilis descensus Averno (the descent to hell is easy)". [14] A resemblance can be found in Ecclesiasticus 21:11, "The way of sinners is made plain with stones, but at the end thereof is the pit of hell."
What's The Saying is a fun and challenging game that will put your brain to work. The object of the game is to match a common phrase with an accompanying coded image. These will test even the most ...
"When Hell freezes over" [2] and "A cold day in Hell" [3] are based on the understanding that Hell is eternally an extremely hot place. The "Twelfth of Never" will never come to pass. [4] A song of the same name was written by Johnny Mathis in 1956. "On Tibb's Eve" refers to the saint's day of a saint who never existed. [5] "When two Sundays ...
"Dayum is a stylized way of saying damn, usually used to indicate surprise, with humorous intent, rather than in response to injury,” John H McWhorter, an associate linguistics professor at ...
When fictional television anchor Howard Beale leaned out of the window, chanting, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" in the 1976 movie 'Network,' he struck a chord with ...
I say it's spinach (sometimes given in full as I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it or further abbreviated to just spinach) is a 20th-century American idiom [1] with the approximate meaning of "nonsense" or "rubbish". [2]