Phrases and Names, Their Origins and Meanings

Where does your name come from? What did 'ivory tower' originally mean, and when did we start saying 'the ball is in your court'? Trench H. Johnson tackled these questions in 1906, filling a glaring gap in reference literature: there was no single volume that gathered together the origins of phrases, personal names, and place names in accessible form. Johnson wrote for the curious reader, not the specialist, preferring plain facts to scholarly ornamentation. The result is a time capsule of early 20th-century language study, showing us which phrases were already ancient in Johnson's day and which were just becoming established. This isn't a dry dictionary but a companion for the linguistically nosy, the kind of book you open at random and disappear into for an hour. It endures because human curiosity about names and phrases never dims, and Johnson understood exactly what that curiosity demands.