Conversely, I seriously doubt that the phrase "drop-dead gorgeous", in French or any other language, was current among teenagers in the 1940s; and this is not the only instance of verbal anachronism.
Indeed, she redefines the phrase "drop-dead gorgeous," since she gives her first husband a heart attack, provokes her second into cutting his throat, shoots the third -- and proves equally fatal to the besotted countess who pursues her from Germany to Paris to Jack the Ripper's London.
David Whitaker, head of Springwell community special school in Barnsley We'd never use a computer programme where you tick a box so a phrase drops into a report – it's not personal enough.
"It is a quiet style," writes translator Andrew Hurley, "whose effects are achieved not with bombast or pomp, but rather with a single exploding word or phrase, dropped almost as though offhandedly into a quiet sentence".
One of the many, many encouraging things to emerge via the laser-like focus on Lewthwaite over the past few days has been the phrase "dropped off the intelligence radar".
According to the footage, Jacobson was wearing a shirt with a dump truck on it and the phrase, "dropping a load".
The fragrant little phrases drop away, and all that remains is a roughly joyful theme, like a "lurching and riotous clangour of bells".
"Shut your mouth … focus what you feel inside …" The lyrics talk of "sacrifice" and "peace of mind", words and phrases dropped like depth charges.
The tone alternates between a boyish enthusiasm for witnessing epoch-making baseball ("we are in the greatest home run era in history," "the most amazing home run hitter since Babe Ruth") and a subtle disdain, a sense of menace, betrayed in stray phrases dropped into every odd paragraph.
