Question: I came across the expression "see red" in Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile," and started wondering how it originated. Can you enlighten me?
Answer: We can't really be sure how the expression "see red," which means "get angry," got started. It seems originally to have been associated with violent anger and loss of self-control, and it is still sometimes used that way, but nowadays it more often suggests ire or indignation of a less violent kind.
One popular attempt to explain the origin of "see red" cites the red flag of the bullfighter that so enrages the bull, but this theory appears to be pure conjecture. The first known use of the phrase in print offers another explanation. In 1899, a short story titled "A Warning in Red" by Victor Whitechurch and E. Conway appeared in Harmsworth Magazine, a British periodical.
One of the characters in the story, a colonel, describes "seeing red" in battle as a "curious psychological phenomenon": "Suddenly the enemy, the country, everything seemed to fade away into a blood-red mist that blinded me with colour. . . . And then the mad desire came upon me to slash and slay. . . . It only comes in battle, I believe. That's the only time you can `see red.' " This explanation is given when another character in the story confesses to never having heard the expression "see red" before.
Since the "psychological phenomenon" explanation of "see red" occurs in the first recorded use of the phrase, it may seem to be persuasive, but we suspect that the authors of the story were actually giving an already extant, albeit not widely known, expression an imaginative derivation of their own devising. Chances are that "see red" really owes its origins more simply and prosaically to the old association of the color red with anger and violence.
Question: The name of Middlesex, a county in Connecticut, is curious. What is its history and true meaning?
Answer: Normally we don't make a practice of trying to determine place-name origins, since they are often difficult or impossible to trace with certainty. The derivation of "Middlesex," however, is straightforward enough that we can make an exception. Let's start off by clarifying that the name "Middlesex," as you might have guessed, has nothing at all to do with the word "sex." The spelling similarity is merely coincidental.
"Middlesex" is the name not only of a county in Connecticut, but also of counties in Massachusetts and New Jersey. There are also seven other New England counties called "Essex" and three more called "Sussex." All of these counties were originally named by British settlers after counties in England. How did the English counties get their names? That question takes us all the way back to the beginning of English history itself.
In the 5th century a wave of invaders from several Germanic tribes - among them the Angles, Saxons and Jutes - emigrated to Britain and established several kingdoms there. The Saxons, in particular, settled largely in three southern kingdoms that eventually came to be called "Eastseaxe," "Westseaxe," and "Suthseaxe." These Old English names refer respectively to the lands of the East Saxons, West Saxons and South Saxons, and over time they evolved into the contracted forms "Essex," "Wessex" and "Sussex."
Among these three kingdoms was a smaller, less significant region called "Middelseaxe," which means "land of the Middle Saxons" and refers to its location between Eastseaxe and Westseaxe. It was this region that later became the Middlesex county of England for which the New England counties of Middlesex were named. The English county became part of Greater London in 1965.