If you're thinking about topping your burger with ketchup, mustard, relish and perhaps a couple of pickle slices, you might want to give your head a shake.

Take a Rammes head that neuer medled with an Ewe, cut off at a blow, and the hornes onely taken away, boyle it well skinne and wooll together,[…].

To say that a woman is of the female persuasion was originally meant for a joke. As such it might pass — once. You might, indeed, refuse to smile; still, you wouldn't feel like invoking the law. But the constant and persistent use of this unfunny bit of fun has frown to be something of a public calamity. It is matter or congratulation, however, that such linguistic lese-majesty is far more common in England than in America.

John came home drunk last night — he’d been at the vino again.