Make Your Home 'Spick-and-Span' — VOA Learning English
Topics: суспільство
Beginning
And now, Words and Their Stories, from VOA Learning English.
On this program, we explore words and expressions in the English language. We give definitions, examples, and notes on usage. And sometimes we use them in conversations.
Today, we talk about an expression to describe something, like a home, a vehicle, or an extremely clean object. The expression is spick-and-span.
Word experts are not sure where spick-and-span came from. But they agree that the expression was first used in The Diary of Samuel Pepys in 1665: “My Lady Batten walking through the dirty lane with new spick-and-span white shoes…”
If your shoes are so white and so clean, we can call them spick-and-span. We might even say…
Tap any word for its translation at once; the word goes into your deck together with its sentence.