‘What? What! What?!’ said my husband with a provoking profligacy of punctuation.
‘What?’ I said before I could stop myself.
‘Buttonhole,’ he said. ‘You say here it’s nothing to do with a hole. But it is. Look. I put my poppy in it.’
‘No dear, the verb.’
Buttonhole, as a verb meaning ‘detain in conversation’, comes from the idea of holding a button of someone’s coat. The word button-holder is first found at the beginning of the 19th century. By the 1830s examples crop up of buttonhold. And as late as 1880s it took the past tense button-held ‘ Charles Lamb, being button-held by Coleridge, simply cut off the button.
But button-hold sounds like buttonholed. Buttonholed was already in use from the 1820s meaning ‘sewed buttonholes’, but that was no obstacle to buttonhole also serving from the 1860s to mean ‘detain in conversation’.
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