At 9.15pm every night the final page of the Guardian is sent to print and the paper is declared "off-stone", a lovely phrase derived from old-fashioned printing methods.
One of the most vivid instances of the industry inventing a tradition - the phrase derives from a celebrated essay by Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian - is the positioning of a diamond engagement ring as an essential piece of matrimonial equipage.
John 'Flat White Starbuckknowswhathat 'serves you right' means (or at least thinks he does): "The 'serves' bit in that phrase derives from 'deserves' so it's a pithy way of saying the roundabout 'you get what you deserve (be that right or wrong)'.
The phrase derives from the French for the cry of a circus acrobat who is about to leap.
A character asks Chris, "Who was the one-eyed man among the blind?" The phrase derives from Erasmus (1469-1536), the Dutch theologian and classical scholar, who said, "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king".
Yet the surrealist movement itself, from which the phrase derives, has been largely forgotten.
Sometimes "bouncebackability", to revive Iain Dowie's phrase, derives not from the whims of players but the dire consequence of omission, from cold fear.
The phrase derives from WH Auden's In Memory of WB Yeats, where Auden says of Yeats that "Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry".
As the use of "compañero" -- comrade -- is associated with an ideological position, many of us began to adopt new forms: "cousin," "young man," "hey you," "Pop"... along with a long list of phrases derived from vulgar speech.
