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Gypsy fortune-tellers always bid their dupe to "cross their hand with a bit of silver." This, they say, is for luck. The silver remained with the owner of the crossed hand. The sign of the cross warded off witches and all other evil spirits, and, as fortune-telling belongs to the black arts, the palm is signed with a cross to keep off the wiles of the devil.
To brag, boast, or triumph. To crow over any one; to keep him in subjection: an image drawn from a cock, who crows over a vanquished enemy. To pluck a crow; to reprove any one for a fault committed, to settle a dispute. To strut like a crow in a gutter; to walk proudly, or with an air of consequence.
To exult over a van- quished or abased person. The allusion is to cocks, who always crow when they have gained a victory.
To nip in the bud; to ruin some scheme before it has been fairly started.
To applaud, encourage. In archery it was customary to appoint certain persons to cry "Aim!" for the sake of encouraging those who were about to shoot.
To give the order to stop; in the old tournaments, when the umpires wished to stop the contest they cried out "Hold!
To give warning (Lat. cave, beware); used by schoolboys when a master comes in sight.
To claim the victory; to assert oneself to be the superior. As a "cock of the walk" (<?.v.) is the chief or ruler of the whole walk, so to cry cock is to claim this cockship.
To be hanged; from the gurgling noise made in strangulation. To warm the cockles of one's heart. Said of anything that pleases one immensely and gives one a gratifying sensation, such as does a glass of really good port. (Lat. cochlece cordis, the ventricles of the heart.
To crave for wfrat is wholly beyond one's reach, The allusion is £o foolish children who want the moon for 3, plaything. The French say, "He wants to take the moon between his teeth" (// veut prendre fa lune avec les dents), alluding to the old proverb about "trie moon," and a "green cheese.
To get out of a bargain; to refuse to carry out one's promise. To cry quits. See QUIT.
To belittle one's own endeavours, offerings, etc. "To cry" here is to offer for sale by shouting one's wares in the street.
To praise loudly and publicly. To cry wolf. See WOLF.
To express contempt or disgust with the mouth.
(Cambridge.) To renounce acquaintance with any one is to CUT him. There are several species of the CUT. Such as the cut direct, the cut indirect, the cut sublime, the cut infernal, &c. The cut direct, is to start across the street, at the approach of the obnoxious person in order to avoid him. The cut indirect, is to look another way, and pass without appearing to observe him.
To renounce acquaintance. There are four sorts of cut — (1) The cut direct is to stare an acquaintance in the face and pretend not to know him.
To make a show; to get oneself looked at and talked about for a showy or striking appearance. "Dashing" means striking — i.e. showy, as a "dashing fellow," a " dashing equipage.
A ship going fast is said to cut a feather, in allusion to the ripple which she throws off from her bows. Metaphorically, "to cut a dash.
To make an imposing appearance through dress, equipage, and bearing.
To make an impression. An American colloquialism usually used in the negative. A swath is the amount of grass or crop cut down with one sweep of a scythe.
To speak gently. To cut bene whiddes; to give good words. To cut queer whiddes; to give foul language. To cut a bosh, or a flash; to make a figure. CANT.
To do some- thing astounding by insignificant means; to do something more eccentric than expedient; to "make pm-cushions of sunbeams" (Swift). The tale is that Accius Naevius, a Roman augur, opposed king Tarqum the Elder, who wished to double the number of senators. Tarqum sneered at his pretensions of augury, and asked if he could do what was then in his thoughts.
To spring upwards in dancing, and rapidly interlace one foot with the other; figuratively, to act in an unusual manner with the object of attracting notice. Caper here is from Ital. capra, a she-goat, the allusion being to the erratic way in which goats will jump about.
To decamp or make off quickly: to "cut one's stick" -.. As luck means chance, the phrase may signify, "I must give up my chance and be off.
Figuratively, to adopt a policy, or take action that ruins one's own chances, plans, etc. Similarly, to cut one another's throat is to ruin one another by excessive competition.
"Cut short all intermission" (Macbeth, iv, 3). To cut it short (cp. AUDLEY) means to bring to an end what you are doing or saying.
To take down a person's conceit. In allusion to the practice of cutting the combs of capons.
To caper about, to heel and toe it in dancing. In jigs the two feet buckle or twist into each other with great rapidity.
To break through an obstacle. The reference is to the Gordian knot (#.v.) shown to Alexander, with the assurance that whoever loosed it would be made ruler of all Asia; whereupon the Macedonian cut it in two with his sword, and claimed to have fulfilled the prophecy.
To sever connexion; to send one to the right about in double quick time. In the late 19th century the phrase was much used in reference to a possible severance between her Colonial Empire and Great Britain.
To be disagreeable or quarrelsome about anything. Cut-off, The American equivalent of the English short cut.
To look out of the corners of one's eyes, to leer, to look askance. The cull cutty-eyed at us; the fellow looked suspicious at us.
To praise in such measured terms as to deprive the praise of any real value.
To work hard to amuse and to have to bear all the expense and take all the trouble oneself as well. The allusion is to Matt, xi, 17: — "We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced.
To wait obsequiously, to be at the beck and call of another. It was an ancient custom at weddings for the bride, no matter how tired she was, to dance with every guest.
To cross one's threshold: almost entirely used only in a threatening way, as "Don't you dare to darken my door again!
up to the present time
To bribe. The cull was scragged because he could not dawb; the rogue was hanged because he could not bribe. All bedawbed with lace; all over lace.
Said of one who fulfills his promises or who comes up to expectations.
To become a turncoat; to turn tail. The allusion is to the military flag.
To be so foolish as to be qualified to carry the fool's emblem of office.
To cheat. To defraud. The cull diddled me out of my dearee; the fellow robbed me of my sweetheart. See Jeremy Diddler In Raising The Wind.
Life is a loan, not a gift, and the debt is paid off by death.
extremely desirable or appealing
To maintain a resolute attitude to the last. A phrase from cock-fighting.
To continue in one's work or occupation till death. The allusion is to a horse working in harness until it falls down dead, or to soldiers in armour or harness. At least we'll die with harness on our back.
To die a violent death, especially one on the scaffold.
To have a shameful, or a miserable, end.
To die of starvation or thirst. One legend has it that Roland escaped the general slaughter in the defile of Ronces- valles, and died of hunger and thirst in seeking to cross the Pyrenees. He was buried at Blayes, in the church of St. Raymond; but his body was removed afterwards to Roncesvalles.
In the captain's private room. The coach or couch of one of the old, large-sized men-of-war was a small apartment near the stern, the floor being formed of the aftmost part of the quarter- deck, and the roof by the poop.
To die, and dine in paradise. To dine with the cross-legged knights. That is, to have no dinner at all. Cp. "to dine with Duke Humphrey." The knights referred to are the stone effigies of the Temple Church, where, at one time, lawyers met their clients.
In Scotland, during the times of the Border feuds, when any of the great families had come to the end of their provisions the lady of the house sent up a pair of spurs for the last course, to intimate that it was time to put spurs to the horses and make a raid upon England for more cattle.
To do it in a slap- dash manner, very imperfectly.
To do it splendidly, regardless of expense.
To abolish, put an end to, destroy entirely.
To act for or manage for. A man ought to do well for his children; a landlady does for her lodgers. Also, to ruin, destroy, wear out. V II do for him. I'll ruin him utterly, or even, I'll kill him; taken in and done for, cheated and fleeced; this watch is about done for, it's nearly worn out.
Said of doing some- thing with consummate ease; a rather scornful expression. "I bet you couldn't walk a mile in seven minutes"; "Pooh! I could do it on my head!
To flatter him ; to treat him in an exceptionally lavish and hospitable way.
To be perfectly fair to hin% to do him justice. King Charles, and who'll do him right now? BROWNING: Cavalier Tunes.
To exert oneself to the utmost. This term, and that above, were originally American slang, and came from the gold-diggings of California.