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Authorities on U.S. slang are quite clear that gobbledygook in the sense of "impenetrable bureaucratic jargon" was introduced in early 1944 by Maury Maverick, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas and at the time chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corporation.
Here is the entry for gobbledygook in J.E. Lighter, Random ...
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Perhaps this is a bit of aside but...the use of ‘boyfriend’ in such situations is usually intended as humourous. Another such term is ‘lover boy’. Affections can run deep in aged care, but holding hands and gazing wistfully is about as far as things can go. I doubt offence would be taken. Perhaps ask the centenarian himself; I bet he’d be tickled by the term....
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"To snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" See yourdictionary.com
(idiomatic) To suddenly lose a contest one seemed very likely to win, especially through mistakes or bad judgment.
Origin of snatch-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory
An ironic reversal of "to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat" (From Wiktionary)
The saying is in ...
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One might group the parts of the sentence: "When [a limpkin or another bird he thought was worth the trouble] paused nearby..."
A simplified version of the entire paragraph is, "When a desirable bird landed within the hunter's range, he shot it."
That is, he doesn't shoot at every bird he sees, only those that are "worth the trouble&...
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104? Really? Wow. Lover man…Valentino.
Or rather, her steady (Etymonline).
Meaning "one's boyfriend or girlfriend" is from 1897; to go steady is 1905 in teenager slang.
(So it seems dated, but the noun is only 20 years older than he is.)
But actually…two short and sweet alternatives:
her guy
her mate
I thought of the first one, googled it, and ...
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I like beau, but it's a little problematic in that it has no feminine equivalent. And fella works when the person in the relationship is speaking of his-her-their, well, fella, but it sounds too familiar if someone else is speaking of him (my mother and her fella attended an interesting lecture).
The man my mother is seeing is only three syllables longer ...
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It is ambiguous. It needs a comma to distinguish between:
“Pass either exam 480, or 483 along with exam 486”
= 480 or (483 +486)
and
“Pass either exam 480 or 483, along with exam 486”
= (480 or 483) + 486
The only argument for the one option is the lack of qualification of 483 by “exam”, favouring the second. But I regard that as weak at best, certainly not ...
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