With California's largest wildfire just over the hill about 10 miles south, we've made our list, checked it twice, and have our go bags and bins ready to load up, if we find we need to leave on the spur of the moment.
Taking a pause from compulsively refreshing Cal Fire's page on the SCU Lightning Complex (20% contained) to wonder about on the spur of the moment. Does this have to do with cavalry and spurring horses to gallop faster or what?
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Word Histories has a nice entry about on the spur of the moment and a variant, on the spur of the occasion. The earliest appearance of the first is July 24, 1784, in Jackson’s Oxford Journal and has to do with a proposal to tax... (wait for it)... watches. As in, timepieces. And the origin does harken to "the use of spurs to urge a horse forward."
The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer concurs.
The Online Etymology Dictionary adds that the expression, which they nudge forward to 1801 for first use, "preserves [the] archaic phrase on the spur 'in great haste'" from the1520s.
And that's all I've got for now!
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| Don't wait until the spur of the moment to pack your go bag! By Anonymous - Official Guide and Catalogue of the International Fire Exhibition, Earl’s Court, 1903 (https://archive.org/details/internationalfir00earl/page/n37), Public Domain, Link |
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2 comments:
Oh my, Ann. Hope you are,and remain, safe.
We're hangin' in there, Liz! The fire complex is now 25% contained, but the wind has kicked up this afternoon, although not in this direction, thank goodness.
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