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Bird of Este The white eagle, thecognisance of the house.
A word not in my dictionary, but quite possibly a useful addition to logo,icon, symbol and emblem
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Bitter End (The ). A outrance; with relentless hostility; also applied to affliction, as, “she bore it to the
bitter end,” meaning to the last stroke of adverse fortune. “All Thy waves have gone over me, but I have
borne up under them to the bitter end.” Here “bitter end” means the end of the rope. The “bitter-end” is a
sea term meaning “that part of the cable which is “abaft the bitts.” When there is no windlass the cables
are fastened to bitts, that is, pieces of timber so called; and when a rope is payed out to the bitter-end, or
to these pieces of timber, all of it is let out, and no more remains. However, we read in Prov. v. 4, “Her
end is bitter as wormwood,” which, after all, may be the origin of the phrase.
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Black Maria The black van which conveys prisoners from the police courts to jail. The French call a
mud-barge a “Marie-salope.” The tradition is that the van referred to was so called from Maria Lee, a
negress, who kept a sailors' boarding house in Boston. She was a woman of such great size and strength
that the unruly stood in dread of her, and when constables required help, it was a common thing to send
for Black Maria, who soon collared the refractory and led them to the lock-up. So a prison-van was called
a “Black Maria.”
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Black Sea So called from the abounding black rock in the extensive coal-fields between the Bosphorus
and Heracle'a.
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Boa Pliny says the word is from bos (a cow), and arose from the supposition that the boa sucked the milk of cows.
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Lorena did it
Bobbit If it isn't weel bobbit we'll bob it again. If it is not done well enough, we will try again. To bob is to dance, and
literally the proverb means, “If it is not well danced, we will dance over again.”
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Bolero A Spanish dance; so called from the name of the inventor.
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Bosh A Persian word meaning nonsense. It was popularised in 1824 by James Morier in his Adventures of Hajji Baba of
Ispahan, a Persian romance. (Turkish, bosh lakerdi, silly talk.)
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Botch A patch. Botch and patch are the same word; the older form was bodge, whence boggle. (Italian pezzo, pronounced patzo.) (this shows how old the text is. To me "botch" means to spoil or do badly.)
Bother i.e. pother (Hibernian). Halliwell gives us blother, which he says means to chatter idly.
“ `Sir,' cries the umpire, `cease your pother,
The creature's neither one nor t'other.' ”
The Irish bódhar (buaidhirt, trouble), or its cognate verb, to deafen, seems to be the original word.
(again, to me bother means to disturb, annoy.)
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Boudoir properly speaking, is the room to which a lady retires when she is in the sulks. (French, bouder,
to pout or sulk.)
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