Bob Walkden wrote:
> 2 more shops in Pied Bull Yard, can't remember the names
> Museum Cameras flew by night...
For our foreign members who may not know the meaning of this term, I offer
this definition, from the book _2107 Curious Word Origins, Sayings, and
Expressions, from White Elephant to Song and Dance_:
>>>
Fly-by-night
Quite properly, anyone who is a "fly-by-night" is one who decamps secretly
or departs hurriedly or clandestinely, usually at night, from a scene of
recent activity, as from solicitous creditors or from anxious purchasers of
worthless mining stocks or the like. In any case, he is a four-flusher, a
swindler, and his activities are fraudulent. But the term originally had a
literal meaning, or at least a meaning that its users thought to be literal.
Even so recently as a century and a half ago it meant a witch, one who, as
popularly supposed, actually mounted her broom or besom at midnight and went
off on her round of appointments, whatever they might have been, or to meet
secretly the Old Boy himself.
<<<
Your etymological enabler,
--Mike J.
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