Showing posts with label cabinet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cabinet. Show all posts

Antique etymology



Plenty of words have more than one meaning (I believe 'set' has most of all, so it sets a record) but one that's always puzzled me is cabinet. As the OED tells us, it's "a case or cupboard... for storing or displaying articles" and it's an "inner circle of ministers controlling government policy".

And today I finally learned the link between them, thanks to a furniture expert on The Antiques Roadshow. It seems that in the 18th century a gentleman would keep his fave trinkets in a cabinet to be displayed only to his inner circle of friends. They became known as 'cabinet friends' and from there it's only a short jump to a cabinet of the Prime Minister's closest associates.

English really is an unending source of small pleasures, don't you think?

Friday roundup: Apprentice, blogs, limos, Croydon

Time for this week's Friday roundup:

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I'm a fan of The Apprentice, which is in its third series here in the UK, and watching it this week I was amused to hear one of the contestants referred to (by Voiceover Man) as a "trained barrister". I didn't know that you could become a barrister without training. What's that – you can't? Then surely just 'barrister' would have done. Or maybe he meant "trained as a barrister but not practising as one..."

Alan Sugar, silver fox

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A couple of additions to our blogroll, both worth checking out: Copy-Editing Corner and Headup: the blog. Seems there are more blogging subs/copy editors than I realised... Talking of which, it might be time that I subdivided my blogroll as it's getting a little unwieldy.

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Earlier in the week Apus wrote a post mentioning the origin of the word limousine, and the photo I downloaded from image library Morguefile to accompany the post turned out to have been taken by the author Emily Roesly. I thought it only fair that I gave her a plug...

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A story in free paper Metro about a teenager who had difficulty ordering a taxi because of the slang she used made me laugh this morning.

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And lastly, I had an email from my mum saying: "I know Posh and Becks called their son Brooklyn, but I've just come across a child called Croydon!"

It's not as unlikely as you might think, oh mother of mine – after all, Croydon has often been referred to as the "Manhattan of South London". On the other hand, David Bowie called it "complete concrete hell" and he's not often wrong...