Foot-stool

verb To tread in ordure: “I came out of my house, footstooled, and spent the rest of the walk to the grocery store dragging my right foot along the sidewalk in an effort to dislodge dog crap.” (Mark Twain)

Mine of information

1. A corruption of “Meinhoff information”.

During the Second World War a double agent known to British intelligence as Fritz Meinhoff became an increasingly useful source. He was thought to have been a young German civil servant who, alarmed when Hitler came to power, determined to undermine the Third Reich from the inside.

Ostensibly an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party, he rose through the ranks of its central command to the equivalent role to a British political party’s junior whip. He had access to policy decisions, military planning and the ear of the Führer. He also spoke impeccable English, and may even have been briefly educated in Engalnd, so decided early in the war that he would be valuable as a spy. With the blessing of the Party, he managed to secure a post at the British consulate in Alexandria as an interpreter. Once inside the building he quickly confided his mission and started to feed disinformation back to Berlin and reliable information to the allies via regular coded broadcasts. General Mountbatten admitted after the war that much of his strategic planning during the African campaign came from information gleaned from this source.

During one broadcast the name Fritz Meinhoff was used as a sign-off. “Meinhoff information” quickly spread throughout the intelligence services as an expression to denote trustworthy tip-offs. Sometime around VE day (May 7, 1945), Meinhoff broadcast a message which revealed his origins as a Nazi turncoat, but neither his real identity nor his location. Subsequent researchers into the story believed his real name was Max Müller, the son of a German dairy magnate, a party member listed as having been posted from Berlin but never returned. Former employees of the British consulate in Alexandria identified Fritz Meinhoff from descriptions of Müller. They said that the man they knew as Meinhoff had left the Consulate on the evening of May 15th, 1945 “to celebrate” and was never seen again.

2. What landfill will eventually become.

The funny farm

Commonly used as a light-hearted alternative to asylum or “mental hospital”, the term has also been used in other spheres.

In entertainment it was used informally to describe a school for clowns founded by Giuseppe Gomito in Victorian London.

In agriculture, it referred to vast sheds used in the production of fungi. Darkened “funny farms” sprang up throughout the USA in the 1940s to cater for the explosion in demand for mushrooms for use in Campbell’s condensed cream-of-mushroom soup.

It is also likely to be a corruption of the earlier English slang term “fanny farm” (brothel).

Bus pass

In the UK the Bus Pass is a pre-paid - or to pensioners, free – ticket allowing one to travel on any bus in a given area. In the US, however, the phrase is a verb as in “I was bus-passed three times today”, meaning “a bus failed to stop for me”. 

It came into common use during civil rights protests of the 1950s, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when the right of black passengers to sit anywhere on a bus became a national issue. Bus-passing was a common complaint among black residents of southern towns in the ‘50s and ‘60s. 

The expression has more or less died out now, thankfully, but is sometimes used to describe the situation where a driver fails to see a passenger at a stop, for example:  “A number 6 came along but I wanted the 2 or the 19, and both of them drew up to the stop but didn’t see me, as the 6 was obscuring me. I was bus-passed like a motherf***er.” (Denis Hopper)

Head butt

noun Literally the reverse of butthead, and meaning someone whose backside resembles a human face.

An evocative expression which, nonetheless, has died of neglect.

Cake hole

Chiefly known as a vulgar Cockney term for the mouth, “Cake Hole” also refers to a system of caves in Yorkshire which contained Britain’s only salt mine. 

Large lumps of raw salt, known as ‘cake’ were extracted from the caves and supplemented the locals’ salt supplies for centuries until the land surrounding them was claimed by Sir Bertram Warbutton, a gentleman farmer and MP, after the General Inclosure Act of 1845. 

Cake Hole had two entrances on either side of a hill. Wind and rain would blow through the cave from one side to the other, causing a salty spray, known to locals as Betty’s Tears.

Warbutton’s ownership of the land coincided with massive expansion of the railway network. When track and stock started to rust almost as soon as it was laid in the area, the culprit was discovered to be the salty spray coming from Cake Hole. Railway owners resented the enormous cost of replacing the damaged ironwork and, during a riotous session in parliament, Warbutton was famously entreated to “Shut your Cake Hole!” by angry MPs of neighbouring constituencies. He closed off one side of the hill in 1852, but following the death of a child miner (aka a “soda muffin”), crushed – but nicely preserved – by a fall of salt in 1869, the Cake Hole was blasted shut and its whereabouts is now forgotten.

Tooth-comb

The expression “search with a fine tooth comb” is often incorrectly punctuated as “fine-tooth comb”. In fact, it should be “fine tooth-comb”. 

The tooth-comb was an early alternative to the tooth-brush and a forerunner of dental floss, looking something like a toothpick with a single row of bristles along it, which was passed between the teeth. The body could be made of pliable green wood or fish bone and the bristles were usually badger or horse hair. 

The intricate work required to whittle and thread a tooth-comb meant that they were prohibitively expensive to all but the very wealthy. London jeweller Joshua Wolsey made particularly fine tooth-combs, sometimes of lead, studded with gem stones. 

Their use were popular at the start of the 17th century but they were frowned upon by Cromwell as a decadent extravagance and had died out by the time of the Great Fire of London (1666), where Wolsey’s celebrated jewellery shop was one of the notable casualties. The expression appears to be a mutation of a line from the diary of Samuel Pepys, where he writes of “searching for a fine tooth-comb” in London in 1669 and bewails their rarity.