The first word of the expression is now good and not God, for good replaced God by analogy with such expressions as good day, perhaps after people no longer had a clear idea of the original sense of the expression. All the livelong day: the expression is actually generally used with a negative connotation, to refer to a period of time that is too long, too tiring: all day long. Well, of course you get to feeling stiff, sitting in front of a computer all the livelong day. I'd go crazy if I had to stay at home all the livelong day. An was originally an unstressed form of the number ān 'one'. Juncture loss: In a process called juncture loss, the n has wandered back and forth between the indefinite article and words beginning with vowels over the history of the language, where for example what was once a nuncle is now an uncle. In old books, people often use the spelling to-day instead of today. When did the change happen? Also, when people wrote to-day , did they feel, when pronouncing the word, that it contained two Purportedly this was the terminology used by Native Americans (at least in kiddie westerns of the 40s and 50s). Many moons ago obviously means many months ago -- a long time ago. It could of course have been an invention of writers who wanted to sound Indian in speech attributed to Native Americans in books and movies, but there's no particular reason to suspect this. As the Marine Corps Training Reference Manual on the history of Marine Recon is named “Aarugha!” (1989), the explanation that it owes its origin to the sound of the Federal Signal H-8 Klaxon gains in credence. So how did Aarugha become part of the common lore? From Gunny G´s Marines site (concerning the origin of the Oorah cry): I heard myself saying something was tickety-boo , meaning good, successful, or satisfactory. Does anyone know where this strange-sounding phrase originated? According to Google's Books Ngram Viewer, the phrase was coined some time around 1800 and peaked around 1930: The oldest reference I could find for olden days is the 1805 Tobias: a poem : in three parts by Rev. Luke Booker: And the oldest I found for olden times is Poems on Affairs of State from 1620 to this Present Year 1707, in a poem called GIGANTOMAXIA, or a full and true Relation of. How did the second, positive meaning arise from the first extremely negative (and long) history of the word? What and where are the earliest uses of the word in this newer positive meaning? For example, names of days and months are considered proper names in English, but not in Spanish, French, Swedish or Finnish, where they are not capitalized. Monday is a unique entity (representing the second day of the week), whereas the corresponding common noun, day, represents any day of the week.