The other week at one of our tea parties, a guest asked me how my writing was going, and I said, “Oh, you know. Plugging away at it.”
My daughter, who always joins us for these parties, looked over at me like I was crazy and said, “Plugging? Seriously? That’s a phrase?”
Yes, dear. That’s a phrase. And I can prove it. 😉
Plug has been a verb since the 1620s, in the sense of filling a hole. But it’s carried the meaning of “to work energetically” from 1865. As of the turn of the twentieth century, it had also taken on the meaning of “popularize by repetition” (like advertisements plugging a new product everywhere you turn).
See, Xoe. Totally a phrase, LOL. And an apt description of the day-to-day schedule of getting up and doing what you love, even when you’re exhausted! 😉
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.