whistle [OE] The first meaning of whistle was ‘a small pipe or flute’. Its origin seems to lie in imitation, for it mimics the physical process of whistling. Whisper [OE] comes from the same root. In wet your whistle, or have a drink, the whistle is your mouth or throat. The first example of its use is by Geoffrey Chaucer in The Reeve’s Tale. To blow the whistle on someone responsible for doing something wrong is to inform on them. The expression comes from a referee blowing a whistle to indicate that a player has broken the rules. When first used in the 1930s it meant ‘bring to an abrupt halt’, but by the 1970s it had come to refer specifically to people exposing wrongdoing in government or industry, hence a whistle-blower [L20th] for someone who does this. In the 1930s a whistle-stop was a small American town on a railway. If a passenger wanted to get off the conductor would sound a whistle to tell the driver he had to stop. A whistle-stop tour was one made by a politician before an election that took in even these obscure places.