Englishgolden age
Meaning: A time when something is at its best.
Example: “The 1930s are often called the golden age of Hollywood.”
Origin: Comes from a scheme in which the golden age is always already over. Hesiod, writing around 700 BC in Works and Days, described a succession of races of humankind — golden first, living without toil or grief, then silver, bronze, a race of heroes, and finally iron, in which Hesiod placed himself and his readers, and which he characterized as a time of labor and moral decline. Ovid reworked the sequence into four ages in the Metamorphoses, and the framework passed into European thought whole. That inheritance is why the phrase is structurally backward-looking: a golden age is by definition something an observer identifies from outside it, and nobody has ever described their own present as one.
More English idioms
- good grief! An expletive that means "This is ridiculous!" or "I've had enough!".
- grasp at straws To act in desperation with little hope of success.
- half-baked Poorly planned or thought out.
- hanky panky Sexual misconduct, mischief, or suspicious dealings.
- have the last laugh To outsmart or get revenge on someone who thinks he or she has been clever.
- happy-go-lucky Carefree.
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Words that look familiar in another language but mean something else entirely.
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