Whats the difference between “bucket” and “pail”? Pail, sad to say, is utterly lacking in this regard EDIT: Taking a look through Google's N-Gram viewer, it's not hard to see why: This comparison of bucket and pail from 1800 till today shows the latter's usage diverging noticeably from the former's around the era of 1940–1960, to becoming a much less popular a synonym for the former
What is the origin of the phrase beyond the pale? From World Wide Words: Pale is an old name for a pointed piece of wood driven into the ground and — by an obvious extension — to a barrier made of such stakes, a palisade or fence
word choice - What are these containers called for waste? - English . . . When I was a kid in the 1960s we had both a trash can and a garbage pail, because, I think, the city collected them separately Rubbish is mostly a British term (I now live in a city where there are separate collections for trash, recyclables, food scraps for compost, and yard waste, but most American cities are doing well to separate trash
Why is a jug of draft beer called a growler? Well did he know the tin pail she placed on the bar It was the growler, the sacred growler of happier days So if usage originally applied the term growler to pitchers, it very quickly (by 1884) expanded to apply also to tin pails Similarly, a tin pail appears in "The Growler Club," in Jingo (November 12, 1884):
What is the origin of Robbing Peter to pay Paul? The origin comes from the Peter tax and the Paul tax: The expression refers to times before the Reformation when Church taxes had to be paid to St Paul's church in London and to St Peter's church in Rome; originally it referred to neglecting the Peter tax in order to have money to pay the Paul tax
word choice - English Language Usage Stack Exchange The terms dinner pail, dinner bucket, lunch box, lunch pail, and lunch bucket all have some currency, per ngrams,, but dinner box much less so Dinner pail is found in euphemism for death "To hand in one's dinner pail", and in the 1900 campaign slogan of William McKinley, "Four more years of the full dinner pail"
Origins and history for phrase tote that barge? In the 1927 musical "Show Boat" there is a famous song -- Old Man River -- with the lyric "Tote that barge Lift that bale " being sung by the slaves laborers in the musical The word tote typically
What is the origin of the phrase Top of the morning to you? The phrase emerges from two related meanings of "top," was a common greeting throughout the United Kingdom in the 19th century, and fell out of use only to be revived as a so-called Irish expression by American filmmakers looking for ways to distinguish Irish characters