Why is a college student in her second year referred to as a “sophomore”?
After her first, or “freshman,” year, a college student is called a “sophomore,” and has been since the description emerged at Cambridge in 1688. The word is constructed from the Greek sophos, meaning wise, and moros, meaning foolish. So a second-year student is somewhere between ignorance and wisdom. Similarly, when we say something is “sophomoric,” we mean it is pretentious or foolish.
Why is a private detective called a “private eye”?
In 1850, the Pinkerton Detective Agency opened in Chicago with the slogan “We never sleep,” and its symbol was a large wide-open eye. Pinkerton was very effective and criminals began calling the feared operation “the eye.” Raymond Chandler and other fiction writers of the 1930s and 1940s simply embellished the underworld expression by
introducing “private eye” as a description for any private investigator.
Why are women temporarily separated from their husbands called “grass widows”?
The expression grass widow originated hundreds of years ago in Europe where summers were unbearably hot. Because grass was scarce in the lowlands, husbands would send their wives and children, along with their resting workhorses, up into the cooler grassy uplands while they stayed in the heat to till the land. It was said that both the wives and horses had been “sent to grass,” which gave us the expression grass widows.
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