19 June 2018

navvy

[nav-ee]

noun, plural navvies. British Informal.

1. an unskilled manual laborer.

Origin of navvy

1825-1835 First recorded in 1825-35; short for navigator

Dictionary.com

Examples from the Web for navvy

Historical Examples

A duke may become a navvy for a joke, but a clerk cannot become a navvy for a joke.
Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens
G. K. Chesterton

And I was a navvy before the war, and joined up for a change.
Pushed and the Return Push
George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)

They came from the navvy shelter, and Tom could hear plainly every word.
Chatterbox, 1905.

Today’s quote

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

– Blaise Pascall

On this day

19 June 1623 – birth of Blaise Pascal, controversial French mathematician, physicist, inventor and writer. Formulated ‘Pascal’s Triangle’, a tabular presentation for binomial coefficients, challenged Aristotle’s followers who claimed that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. The computer programming language, ‘Pascal’, is named in his honour. Died 19 August 1662.

19 June 1945 – birthday of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese politician, activist and Nobel Peace Prize Recipient.

19 June 1978 – The original Grumpy Cat, Garfield, first appears in newspaper comic strips in the USA.