Hello, V.C.! Welcome aBoard.
There's a lot to be said for an old fahion classic education. One of the things the Good Sisters insisted upon was our learning the correct use of many phrases that originated in languages other than English/American including hoi polloi... and even a few in our Mother Tongue.
My memory of the 1940s into the mid-1950s is that the phrase was used correctly in those years even in newspapers and on radio...
Dr. Bill - help me out here - wasn't there a radio interview program in the 1940s that boasted it was "the voice of the hoi polloi?" In days of yore there were lists of "Common Phrases From Foreign Languages" at the back of dictionaries .. check out the AWAD chat (You can connect from the bottom of the AWAD Home page) with G. Nichols of Random House, in which she said it was the cost that caused the glossary's being dropped. I would pay the extra for a dictionary with that feature but Random House evidently feels most people would not.
How I wish Random House would make a separate book available with all those phrases!
Hey! Is that an idea, or ... what !?!?
