Word Imperfect

 
Word Imp is back in business. If you have never visited her blog I can thoroughly recommend that you do so. Her site is great fun.
 

High in the instep

 
High in the instep is a slang term meaning overly proud or arrogant. It was first recorded in 1540 and was still in use as a dialect expression in the 20th century.
 

Minatory

 
Minatory means baleful, meanacing, threatening or foreshadowing evil or tragic developments.
 

Potation

 
Potation - and archaic term meaning the act of drinking (especially an alcoholic drink). "After his potations of the night before he looked rather hung over."
 

To Ring a Peal

 
One might imagine that the phrase 'to ring a peal' related to ringing the bells in a church but in fact, in the Nineteenth Century, it meant to scold or tell off according to the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, originally by Francis Grose. It was usually applied to either a master / servant relationship or a wife / husband one.
His wife rung him a fine peal!
 

Blue-devilled

 
Blue-devilled is an archaic term for depressed, sad, dreary, or miserable. The phrase goes back at least as far as 1798 when George Colman produced a one-act farce "Blue Devils".

Why misery should be associated with the colour blue I have never quite worked out but a fit of the blues (meaning depression) is a phrase still in common usage.
 

Cack-handed

 
Cack-handed is a slang phrase used to mean either clumsy or left-handed. (Left-handedness being often asociated weith clumsiness though there is absolutely no relationship between the two.)
Left-handedness is the preference for the left hand over the right for everyday activities such as writing. Most left-handed people exhibit some degree of ambidexterity. Left-handedness is relatively uncommon; 90 to 93 percent of the adult population is right-handed.
 

Paregoric

 
Paregoric, or camphorated tincture of opium, also known as tinctura opii camphorata, is a medication known for its antidiarrheal, antitussive, and analgesic properties. It was a household remedy in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it was widely used to calm fretful children. The word is no longer in use.
 

Off the cuff

 
Off the cuff means not prepared in advance; impromptu; or extemporaneous. It can also mean informal or casual.

"His off the cuff remarks got him into trouble."
One site quotes the origins of this phrase as being 'back in olden times' when people who borrowed money had the debt written down on the lenders cuff in the absence of a formal contract. That seems unlikely to me, even in days when washing one's linen was not carried out quite so punctiliously as it is nowadays. (I later discovered that the phrase 'on the cuff' is slang for 'on credit' but I still have doubts about its orogins.)

I should have thought a far more likely origin for off the cff was the idea of a person using his cuff on which to make some basic notes for a speech. He would then refer to these notes during the speech which, rather than being read out in a prepared manner, simply covered the main points off the cuff. The term seems to have entered the English language around the 1940s.
 

Level crossing

 

Level crossing is a term for where a road and a railway cross at the same level. According to my dictionary it is a British English term so I'm not sure what the American equivalent is - train crossing or railroad crossding perhaps? In most cases the crossing is controlled by gtes which close off the road and stop the road traffic while the train goes through. In the 'good old days' these were manhandled but nowadays - so far as I know - they are all conrolled from a signal box (either sutomatically or by a human keeping warm and dry inside).

The director of rail safety at the UK HM Railway Inspectorate commented in 2004 that "the use of level crossings contributes the greatest potential for catastrophic risk on the railways." Eighteen people were killed in the UK on level crossings in 2003-4. Bridges and tunnels are now favoured, but this can be impractical in flat countryside where there is insufficient space to build a roadway embankment or tunnel (because of nearby buildings).


How not to use a level crossing.