👉 Okay, let’s tackle that wonderfully prickly little bit of a word! Now, I feel obliged to say immediately: "spur throated" isn’t actually a recognised, standard English collocation. You won't find it in the Chambers. Instead, it was spectacularly birthed into existence thanks to a 19th-century American wood engraver named, rather unimaginatively, John Thompson.
Here’s what happened (drumroll please… sort of!): Thompson, while illustrating a Gilbert Stockton short story about an exasperated young gentleman and his perpetually bungneck fiancée, needed to describe the young man's face as he was absolutely apalled by her. Stockton himself described it as a look of "spur throated astonishment". Thompson, bless his artistic soul, just… latched onto that little phrase and ran with it. He apparently found the sound of saying it amusing, and then proceeded to engrave that exact expression repeatedly throughout the woodcut illustrations! Essentially, he simply combined the idea of a “spur-like throbbing of astonishment/anger." Thompson seemed to think you could almost feel your face going a little… prickly, with the force of the feeling. It's the sort of phrase that just sounds a bit ridiculous and old-fashioned. You know, like a really good badger. Now for an unsettling, albeit slightly comedic, example sentence: "When the telegram arrived informing him his only remaining
