Literal Translation
A pretty… lurette
Actual Meaning
A long time (ago)
Etymology
Also used to say ‘it’s been a long time’, this one has a completely different origin. It literally means ‘for a little over an hour’. ‘Lurette’ is in fact a distortion of the Old French ‘heurette’, itself a diminutive of the word “heure”. Its meaning has evolved to mean ‘for a long time’. It is worht noting that in the Middle Ages, the forms ‘heurete’, ‘horette’, ‘horeite’, ‘hurete’ and ‘urette’ did not imply a long time.