Down in the Dumps

Psychiatrist Carl Jung stated that “the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

It’s a fact of life that we all experience sadness every now and then, and the idiom down in the dumps is one way to describe that unhappy feeling.  

Down in the dumps means to be in a discouraged, depressed, or sad mood. The expression down in the mouth is similiar. 

- Carlo felt down in the dumps after he failed his driver’s test. 

- Kim has been feeling down in the mouth because of recent money problems.

The noun dumps has been used for "a state of depression" since the early 1500s, and down in the mouth, alluding to the downturned corners of the mouth as a sign of misery, dates from the mid-1600s.*

The more you use idioms and phrasal verbs, the better your fluency will be. I will be happy if you add down in the dumps to your vocabulary :)

*This is according to the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer. 

Words named after people

Sometimes it’s easy to know the meanings of English words if you recognize their Latin roots:

bene --> means good --> English word = benefit

manu --> means hand --> English word = manual

There are other times when we’re not so lucky, especially when the word doesn’t give you any clue at all. Words named after people (eponyms) fit in this category.


I think the most famous example of a word originating from a person's name is sandwich, created by the Earl of Sandwich back in 1762. Let's add to the list:

Silhouette = an image of a person, object or scene consisting of the outline and a featureless interior. Named after Etienne de Silhouette in 1759. One of his hobbies was creating paper portraits.

Mentor = teacher or trusted counselor. From Ancient Greece, Mentor is a character in Homer’s Odyssey. The main character, Odysseus, asks Mentor to look after his son, Telemachus, when Odysseus departs for the Trojan War.

Boycott = withdraw from commercial or social relations with (a country, organization, or person) as a punishment or protest. Boycott is named after Captain Charles Boycott, an English land agent in Ireland who, in 1897, was ostracized (excluded from a society or group) for refusing to reduce rents.

It all makes sense when we know the stories behind the words.