opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings, the

The opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings. Many have wondered where this phrase comes from. Well, they have to keep on wondering because the origin is obscure.

The earliest recorded version of the phrase is somewhat different than the one familiar to most people. It appears in a 1976 pamphlet titled Southern Words and Sayings, by Fabia and Charles Smith:

Church ain’t out ‘till the fat lady sings — It ain’t over yet.

Ralph Keyes, in his book Nice Guys Finish Seventh, cites numerous people who claim to have been familiar with the phrase, in one form or another, in the decades prior to the 1970s, but no one has found a recorded use prior to 1976.

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How did a word meaning a bundle of sticks become an epithet for a gay man? It was process of gradual semantic shift over several centuries and continents.

The ultimate origin of faggot, the word for a bundle of sticks, is unknown. The English word comes from the French fagot. There is an apparent cognate in the Italian fagotto, so there may be some common Latin root. But if so, it has been lost. From Cursor Mundi, a Northumbrian poem from before 1300, as it appears in Göttingen University Library MS. Theol. 107:

Suord ne fir forgat he noght,
And ȝong ysaac a fagett broght.
(Sword nor fire he forgot not,
And young Isaac a faggot brought.)1

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The English word face is taken from the French and ultimately comes from the Latin facia, meaning originally appearance, visage, and a bit later the front part of the head. In English, this order is reversed with the later Latin meaning appearing first. From Saints’ Lives, a manuscript from c.1290, found in the Early South English Legendary (1887):

More blod thar nas in al is face.
(More blood there than in all his face.)

The sense of outward appearance, look, or semblance appears in English a bit later, even though this is the original sense of the Latin root. From Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foules, c.1381:

And right as Aleyn, in the Pleynt of Kynde,
Devyseth Nature of aray and face,
in swich aray men myghte hire there fynde.
(As right as Alan, in the Complaint of Gender,
devised nature an order and face,
in such array might find her there.)

The use of face to mean reputation and honor in the phrases to save face and to lose face are calques of Chinese brought into the language by 19th century English expatriates. Tiu lien in Chinese means literally to lose face and metaphorically to be humiliated or have one’s reputation besmirched. From Robert Hart’s 1876 These From the Land of Sinim:

Arrangements by which China has lost face.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition; Middle English Dictionary)


The exact origin of this word meaning an overwhelming yen or craving is unknown. It obviously refers to the name Jones, but exactly how it developed is uncertain. The 1962 edition of Maurer and Vogel’s Narcotics and Narcotic Addiction glosses it as:

Jones. A drug habit.

Claude Brown’s 1965 Manchild In the Promised Land uses it to mean the symptoms of heroin withdrawal:

My jones is on me...something terrible. I feel so sick.

By 1970, it had generalized into any desire or yearning. From Clarence Major’s Dictionary of Afro-American Slang from that year:

Jones: a fixation;...compulsive attachment.

(Source: Historical Dictionary of American Slang)


Charles Darwin will forever be associated with the “Theory of Evolution,” but while Darwin is the father of modern evolutionary theory, he is not the first to use that term to describe the gradual change in living things over time.

The word evolution is from the Latin evolutionem, which meant the unrolling of a scroll (book). It was used metaphorically to describe the orderly playing out of preordained events. From Henry More’s Complete Poems (1647):

Evolution Of outward forms spread in the worlds vast spright.

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ethnic cleansing

The term ethnic cleansing, a euphemism for genocide, came to the fore in the 1990s with the war in the former Yugoslavia. On 2 August 1991, a Washington Post article used the term in a translation of a Croatian political statement:

The Croatian political and military leadership issued a statement Wednesday declaring that Serbia’s “aim...is obviously the ethnic cleansing of the critical areas that are to be annexed to Serbia.”

The history of the term is much older though. The term ethnically clean dates to a decade earlier, in a 12 July 1982 New York Times article about the Serbian province of Kosovo:

The nationalists have a two-point platform, according to Becir Hoti, an executive secretary of the Communist Party of Kosovo, first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania.

The term social cleansing, referring to the removal of the poor and otherwise undesirable dates to the 1970s. From D.J. Olsen’s 1976 Growth of Victorian London:

Long before the very rich began to covet converted workmen’s cottages the social cleansing of Chelsea had begun.

And the use of cleansing to refer to purging of minorities in an area or region dates to the 1936 in translation in the American Political Science Review of the German Säuberungsaktion:

In Berlin, for example, there was a cleansing process (Säuberungsaktion), directed against Marxists, Jews, and others who were alleged to be enemies of the state, involving wholesale charges of corruption and inefficiency.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

elephant, to see the




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The term eighty-six is restaurant/bar slang for an item that is out of stock or a customer that is to be denied service. The origin is obscure, but it seems likely that the number has no significance; it is simply part of a larger numbering scheme used by waiters and soda-jerks.

George Manker Watters and Arthur Hopkins’s 1927 play Burlesque contains this exchange, which appears to be a use of eighty-six in the sense of denying a customer service, although this is not certain:

Waiter...If you need any Scotch or gin, sir—...My number is Eighty Six...Skid...Yeah. Eighty Six. I know. (Waiter exits R. Skid draws enormous flask from pocket.)1

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dollars to doughnuts

This phrase is clearly an allusion to odds in a bet—such a sure thing that the speaker is willing to wager real money against pastries—back when doughnuts were worth far less than a dollar. The terms were undoubtedly chosen for alliterative and metaphorical purposes. No one is seriously suggesting that people used to gamble with pastries. The phrase dates to at least 1876 when it appears in the 11 March Daily Nevada State Journal:


The form dollars to buttons is also encountered in early texts, bolstering the idea that it is the value of the doughnuts, not anything else, that is key to the metaphor. From George W. Peck’s Peck’s Boss Book of 1884:

It is dollars to buttons that...she will be blown through the roof.

(Sources: ADS-L; Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

egg on

This term meaning to encourage or incite has nothing to do with throwing eggs. The verb egg dates to 1200 and is from the Old Norse eggja. From the Trinity College Homilies, c.1200:

Alse the deuel him to eggede.
(And the devil egged him.)

The phrase to egg on is 16th century. From Thomas Drant’s 1567 Horace His Arte of Poetrie, Pistles and Satyrs Englished:

Db, Ile egge them on to speake some thyng, whiche spoken may repent them.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

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