Eschew

  
To eschew means to shun; avoid; stay away from deliberately; stay clear of; to avoid habitually especially on moral or practical ground.

It is generally pronounced e-shu.

Label-stops and Head-stops

 

Many church windows have decorative hood moulds, or drip stones, projecting above the windows to protect them from rainwater running down the walls. They end in what are generally called label-stops. When these label-stops are in the form of a human head they are called head-stops.

For more examples of head-stops see On the Wirral.

Greenfield and Brownfield

 
A greenfield site is one to be used for housing or commerce, whose previous use (if any) was agricultural. The term can lso be used generally to refer to any undeveloped lands such as fields or forests. The term has been around for many decades.

It was only recently that I heard the term brownfield site. Brownfield sites iare abandoned or underused industrial and commercial facilities available for re-use. Expansion or redevelopment of such a facility may be complicated by real or perceived environmental contaminations.

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.