Dicky Seat

 

A rumble seat, dicky seat, dickie seat or dickey seat is an upholstered exterior seat which hinges or otherwise opens out from the rear deck of a pre-World War II automobile, and seats one or more passengers. In a carriage, a rumble (short for "rumble-tumble") was a seat behind the body used by servants.

Prior to World War I, a single, center-mounted rumble seat was sometimes referred to as a mother-in-law seat.

Lingua Franca

 
Lingua Franca was originally a term applied to a language - a mixture of Italian, French, Greek and Arabic - spoken on the coasts of the Mediterranean.

Nowadays it is used to mean any muixture of languages that serves as a means of communication between different peoples.

Hobby-horse

   Originally to ride a hobby-horse was to play a childish game of which one soon tired.  Nowadays it implies dwelling to excess on a pet theory.  The transition between the two came around the time of John Wesley (1703-1791) who wrote in omne of his sermons "Everyone has (to use the cant term of the day) his hobby-horse!

Standee

When I saw this notice at the front of our local bus I assumed they had made up the word 'standee' but it seems it was simply one which had escaped my notice before.

A standee is somebody who is forced to stand, for example on a crowded bus;

(I still can't make sense of the notice though - I think it was meant to read 1 wheelchair or five standees.)

A standee is also a life-size shape, for instance of a celebrity, cut out of cardboard, often used for advertising and promotional purposes.

"He had his picture taken with a standee of the president"

Agony Aunt

 
An agony aunt is someone who answers questions about personal problems in a newspaper or magazine. Agony columns go back to at least 1860 – at which time they included messages for missing relatives – but the phrase itself seems to date back to about the 1930s. Neither phrase was greatly used until the 1970s and both are mainly restricted to Britain.
 

Misogyny

  Misogyny is hatred (or contempt) of women or girls  

Mimesis

  Mimesis is the imitative representation of nature and human behavior in art and literature. The word also means any disease that shows symptoms characteristic of another disease; the representation of another person's words in a speech; or mimicry of one species by another - often for means of self-protection.