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Dec 10, 2007

This week's theme
Whose what?

This week's words
busman's holiday
friar's lantern
curate's egg
widow's peak
shank's mare

Previous week’s theme
Miscellaneous words

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Our language is sprinkled with terms coined with the formula X's Y. There are diseases and syndromes and body parts named after physicians (Parkinson's disease); there are theorems, laws, and numbers named after scientists (Avogadro's number); there are plants named after botanists (Ahnfelt's seaweed); and there are places named after explorers, though some are named after no one ("no man's land" :-).

This week we'll look at five terms that follow this X's Y or "someone's something" formula, terms that are named after no one in particular.

busman's holiday (BUS-manz HOL-i-day)

noun: A holiday spent doing things as at work.

[Imagine a bus driver having a day off, 'enjoying' a bus ride and you'll have a pretty good idea of this term. Going on a long drive might be a great vacation for many of us, but not for a bus driver. Of course, when the phrase came up some 200 years ago, bus drivers had charge of horse-drawn buses. The term is sometimes seen as 'businessman's holiday'.]

"Boundless energy and vaulting ambition carried Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency of France. Now that he has had just over 100 days in office (including a hyperactive busman's holiday in New Hampshire), it is a good time to take stock of where all this energy may be leading."
The World According to Sarkozy; The Economist (London, UK); Aug 30, 2007.

See more usage examples of busman's holiday in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

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