Dressed to the nines

Posted by RRC on July 01, 2009 at 18:19

In Reply to: Dressed to the nines posted by Gary Martin on July 01, 2009 at 07:40:

: : About the entry for "dressed to the nines": I note that Cervantes mentions "outfitting his donkey to the ninety-nines" in "Don Quixote", which seems to have been written before any of the other sources cited so it must have originated from further antiquity.

: That's worth some further investigation, with a word of caution. Cervantes is given credit for various phrases which he didn't coin but which only appear in the later Victorian translations of Quixote into English.

In fact, the original Spanish here says "puso su
jumento a las mil lindezas" - put his donkey to the thousand beautifulnesses (very roughly translated).