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Feb 2, 2010
This week's theme
Eponyms

This week's words
Annie Oakley
John Bull
Maginot line
daltonism
methuselah

John Bull
John Bull
WWI recruiting poster
Source: HMSO

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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

John Bull

PRONUNCIATION:
(jon bul)

MEANING:
noun
1. A personification of England or the English people.
2. A typical Englishman.

ETYMOLOGY:
After John Bull, a character in John Arbuthnot's satire, Law Is a Bottomless Pit (1712).

USAGE:
"Current historiography on the Mandate period is no longer dominated by a demonization of the British, which was a recurrent theme during the first decades of the state. Yet the disintegration of the old mythology is no reason to create a new mythology, this one a fantasy of John Bull in Palestine as a kind of disoriented Santa Claus, as in Segev's skewed account."
Anita Shapira; Eyeless in Zion; The New Republic (Washington, DC); Dec 11, 2000.

See more usage examples of John Bull in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. -Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer (1564-1642)

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