Where does the phrase "fair do's/dues/doos/does" come from?
2017年1月31日 · 1859 T. Hughes Scouring of White Horse vi. 122 Only seemed to want what they called ‘fair doos’. 1862 C. C. Robinson Dial. Leeds & Neighbourhood 282 ‘A shabby dew’, says a man who has had twopence given him for getting a waggon-load of coals in. ‘A fairish dew’, says another who has got a shilling and a lot of victuals away with him ...
Where does 'doofus' (or perhaps 'dufus') come from?
2013年9月13日 · UPDATE: March 2, 2015. Since I now have access to J.E. Lighter's excellent Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994), I decided to add some of the details of its coverage of doofus and goofus to my earlier answer.
Where does the phrase "cool your jets" come from?
2013年7月2日 · I ran a search for jets on a free, searchable online copy of Gray Lensman (which was originally serialized in 1939–1940 in Astounding Science-Fiction), and found three idiomatic phrases involving jets: "clog [one's] jets" (six occurrences in the novel), "burn out [one's] jets" (two occurrences), and "baffle [one's] jets (one occurrence).