From the start, to tip meant to give somebody money, but four hundred years ago the money was given for a slightly different reason. It was part of the thieves' cant, a language used by the criminal underworld in Britain. You've probably used some of their secret code words today. The verb to "tout," which now means "praise something highly" started out meaning "to keep lookout and warn everybody if you saw the one time coming." They even gave us the idea to use "kid" to mean to joke with somebody (to them, it was treating somebody like a child).
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here. The first few are actually more surprising.
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Fantasticnating post on the intentionally lost in translation from my darling cousin.
Twix = "The one with the biscuit and the moo."
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–noun
1. the final resolution of the intricacies of a plot, as of a drama or novel.
2. the place in the plot at which this occurs.
3. the outcome or resolution of a doubtful series of occurrences.
What I want to know is when and why did everyone start using this?
I mean, I'm an English major, and I don't remember covering it in any class. Maybe at the college level we're expected to know it, but then I know we didn't cover it in high school--because in Freshman English our teacher was a firm believer in rote and made us memorize and regurgitate the terms and definitions of everything she deemed important. And while I have to admit that, going back over her definitions, they were pretty damn good, we never covered "denouement."
So where did it come from? More importantly, how do we stop people from using it instead of "outcome"?
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seigniorage:
the difference between the cost of the bullion plus minting expenses and the value as money of the pieces coined, constituting a source of government revenue.
Wikipedia breaks it down:
Instead of issuing gold certificates, a government converts gold into currency at the market rate by printing paper notes. A person redeems an ounce of gold for its value in currency, keeps that currency for a year, then trades the currency back in for an amount of gold at market value, which may yield a different amount of gold from that started with if its price has increased or decreased during that year.
If the value of gold has gone up in the interim, then the amount the redeemer receives in return for his paper notes will be less than he originally paid for them. Seignorage occurs.
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1. overabundance or superfluity of words, as in writing or speech; wordiness; verbosity.
2. manner or style of expressing something in words; wording: a manual of official verbiage.
However, many people use it to mean, "phraseology," which is closer to the second definition of verbiage: manner or style of verbal expression; characteristic language.
(For example, I just edited a piece where the author used "verbiage" to mean "phrase." [I suspect the author did it because "verbiage" sounds smart, but it doesn't when you use it improperly].)
Anyway, using "verbiage" to mean the second definition can be confusing to someone who takes "verbiage" to mean "overabundance of words," so it's probably best to stick to "phraseology" when you mean "manner of expression something in words."
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...and I think of this sort of thing as a faux paux...
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"spirit of the time"
Sort of like the pervading feeling of an age.
The Zeitgeist of the Great Depression was hopelessness.
An easing of political tensions was the Zeitgeist of the Era of Good Feelings.
However, finding a synonym for
Zeitgeist isn't very difficult, and the only reason most people use it is so they can have something fierce and German and italicized in their writing.
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