Yahoo Canada Web Search

Search results

  1. Sep 20, 2023 · The term nottie is a slang term used to describe someone who is considered unattractive, particularly women. It is the opposite of a hottie, which refers to an attractive person. The term is often used in a judgmental way to criticize someone’s physical appearance. While it is primarily used to describe women, it can also be used to describe men.

    • Rugile
    • Cat Got Your Tongue. Meaning: Said to someone who remains silent when they are expected to speak. Origin: There are two stories on how this saying came into being.
    • The Walls Have Ears. Meaning: Be careful what you say as people may be eavesdropping. Origin: The face Louvre Palace in France was believed to have a network of listening tubes so that it would be possible to hear everything that was said in different rooms.
    • Bury The Hatchet. Meaning: End a quarrel or conflict and become friendly. Origin: During negotiations between Puritans and Native Americans men would bury all of their weapons, making them inaccessible.
    • Cold Feet. Meaning: Loss of nerve or confidence. Origin: This idiom originates from a military term, warriors who had frozen feet were not able to rush into battle.
  2. A nottie is the opposite of a hottie. While hotties are hot (i.e. conventionally attractive), notties are not. This judgmental term is most often used to describe women, but can also be used to describe men. Someone (most likely a man) coined the term nottie because they realized the phrase "not a hottie" could be condensed to nottie.

    • By The Same Token
    • Get on A Soapbox
    • Tomfoolery
    • Go Bananas
    • Run of The Mill
    • Read The Riot Act
    • Hands Down
    • Silver Lining
    • Have Your Work Cut Out
    • Through The Grapevine

    Bus token? Game token? What kind of token is involved here? Token is a very old word, referring to something that’s a symbol or sign of something else. It could be a pat on the back as a token, or sign, of friendship, or a marked piece of lead that could be exchanged for money. It came to mean a fact or piece of evidence that could be used as proof...

    The soapbox that people mount when they get on a soapboxis actually a soap box, or rather, one of the big crates that used to hold shipments of soap in the late 1800s. Would-be motivators of crowds would use them to stand on as makeshift podiums to make proclamations, speeches, or sales pitches. The soap box then became a metaphor for spontaneous s...

    The notion of Tom fool goes a long way. It was the term for a foolish person as long ago as the Middle Ages (Thomas fatuus in Latin). Much in the way the names in the expression Tom, Dick, and Harry are used to mean “some generic guys,” Tom fool was the generic fool, with the added implication that he was a particularly absurd one. So the word tomf...

    The expression go bananas is slang, and the origin is a bit harder to pin down. It became popular in the 1950s, around the same time as go ape,so there may have been some association between apes, bananas, and crazy behavior. Also, banana is just a funny-sounding word. In the 1920s, people said “banana oil!” to mean “nonsense!”

    If something is run of the mill, it’s average, ordinary, nothing special. But what does it have to do with milling? It most likely originally referred to a run from a textile mill. It’s the stuff that’s just been manufactured, before it’s been decorated or embellished. There were related phrases like run of the mine, for chunks of coal that hadn’t ...

    When you read someone the riot actyou give a stern warning, but what is it that you would have been reading? The Riot Act was a British law passed in 1714 to prevent riots. It went into effect only when read aloud by an official. If too many people were gathering and looking ready for trouble, an officer would let them know that if they didn’t disp...

    Hands downcomes from horse racing, where, if you’re way ahead of everyone else, you can relax your grip on the reins and let your hands down. When you win hands down, you win easily.

    The silver lining is the optimistic part of what might otherwise be gloomy. The expression can be traced back directly to a line from Milton about a dark cloud revealing a silver lining, or halo of bright sun behind the gloom. The idea became part of literature and part of the culture, giving us the proverb every cloud has a silver liningin the mid...

    The expression you’ve got your work cut out for youcomes from tailoring. To do a big sewing job, all the pieces of fabric are cut out before they get sewn together. It seems like if your work has been cut for you, it should make job easier, but we don’t use the expression that way. The image is more that your task is well defined and ready to be ta...

    A grapevine is a system of twisty tendrils going from cluster to cluster. The communication grapevine was first mentioned in 1850s, the telegraph era. Where the telegraph was a straight line of communication from one person to another, the “grapevine telegraph” was a message passed from person to person, with some likely twists along the way.

    • Arika Okrent
    • Elizabeth Enochs
    • "Call A Spade A Spade" Until recently, I genuinely thought this phrase only meant "call it like it is." I grew up hearing it, and even though I've never used it that often (mainly because I just don't think it's that commonplace among millennials), I didn't think there was anything problematic about the term.
    • "Hip-Hip Hooray" This is yet another phrase that wasn't initially racist, but has developed racist connotations over time. Furthermore, the way in which this cheery exclamation got its racist meaning will make you sick to your stomach.
    • "Grandfather Clause" Or "Grandfathered In" Of all the phrases on this list, I have probably heard this one used, and used it myself, more than any of the others.
    • "Paddy Wagon" If you've ever used the term "paddy wagon" to describe a police car, you should know the root of this phrase is incredibly offensive. "Paddy" is actually a shortened form of "Patrick," which began being used in the 1700s as a derogatory term for Irish people.
  3. Jul 16, 2001 · an unattractive girl who hangs out with a group of Hotties at a party, whose job is it to make sure her friends do not hook up and leave her at the end of the night. she will put down every joke that a male tries to use on her hot friend and will publicly point out every oddity in his appearance.

  4. People also ask

  5. Jul 29, 2020 · Call a Spade a Spade. The origin of the phrase "call a spade a spade" is a little more unclear. According to NPR, it may be an evolved form of the saying "to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough ...

  1. People also search for