The word battleship was coined around 1794 and is a contraction of the phrase line-of-battle ship, the dominant wooden warship during the Age of Sail.
Such so-called cover tests are a common tool employed by magazine editors to determine which cover lines will increase sales, with stock phrases line "7 new ways to be happy" or "8 new love truths you must learn" commonly appearing.
It will also feature some nicely phrased lines from a BBC contract drawn up in the 1980s when she was invited to show viewers the right way to use a condom.
In the hit-and-run show stopper "Amor ti vieta," from Giordano's dismal "Fedora," the delicacy of the phrasing (lines taken in a single breath alternating with lines of similar length taken in two) is as unusual as it is natural and discreet.
Fox uses every poetic means at his disposal: phrase length, line break, puns.
You listen to her and you sense that she could phrase a line however she wanted.
Mr. Trichet was asked repeatedly whether the substitute phrase, "in line," had a looser meaning.
They were a poetic phrase in line with Sufi philosophy: "All that you have ever learned, it is time to forget".
They take the form of rhythmic risks over a steady pulse; you listen to her and sense that she could phrase a line however she wanted.
Along the lake's southern shore, yellow strips of plastic bearing a familiar phrase, "Police Line Do Not Cross," fluttered from trees and lampposts.
To our contributors – from John le Carré to Colin Firth, Salman Rushdie to Barry Humphries, Ian McEwan to James Earl Jones, Jonathan Franzen to Daniel Radcliffe – a moist eye seems the natural, if involuntary response to a particular phrase or line, thought or image.
