A.Word.A.Day --John Bull

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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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