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18 comments to "Origin of Familiar Phrases"
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Event Promoter
July 23rd, 2007 at
2:07 am
I often find myself asking where certain expressions come from, but often forget to look them up when they come to mind. I should probably check out one of those Bathroom Readers, although I think I may find myself spending too much time in the bathroom.
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Rhys
July 23rd, 2007 at
3:10 am
Stumping Someone: I always assumed it was from cricket.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stump_%28cricket%29#Manner_of_dismissing_ a_batsman
Oh well, you live and learn
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Edward
July 23rd, 2007 at
10:18 am
Since I agree with Rys *and* know that the origin of “pig in a poke” is wrong, I will decline to believe any of these.
Take a look at the “What Is It” archives at http://puzzlephotos.blogspot.com/ to find out what a poke really is and why a pig wearing one is not a good purchase.
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anonymous
July 23rd, 2007 at
11:44 am
almost all of these are totally wrong. too bad.
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yndy
July 24th, 2007 at
2:23 am
Edward appears to be smoking crack - not only is there nothing resembling a “poke” on the page he linked, but if you google “pig in a poke” the same explanation given above comes up everywhere…
Some are right, some are wrong, some are simply conjecture - that’s the problem with this sort of thing - the origins are at best, usually guessed at.
It’s still an entertaining list.
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Rod
July 24th, 2007 at
4:51 am
The ‘pig in a poke’ item gets so close to explaining the origin of ‘let the cat out of the bag’, but strangely stops just short of it. We are told that a poke is a bag and that a cat would sometimes be put in. Of course, if you opened it to see if there really was a pig inside, you would be in danger of ‘letting the cat out of the bag’.
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Mike
July 24th, 2007 at
5:25 am
The expression “To paint the town red” actually originates from the town of Melton Mowbray in the East Midlands in England.
Many years ago a group of inebriated nobility, on a fox hunting holiday, came across a pot of red paint and proceeded to daub various houses, shop fronts and gates with it.
The event is “celebrated” in various pictures and prints which continue to be popular to this day.
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Haijo
July 24th, 2007 at
5:29 am
Paint the town red was from Roman times when the town would recover there houses in a red mortar then have a big party.
Tard.
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Ben
July 24th, 2007 at
7:16 am
I think the explanation of Touch and Go is incorrect here. The phrase is more likely to come from aviation or sailing. If the landing goes wrong, a pilot will do a “touch and go”, meaning the wheels will touch down, then the plane will be off again.
Alternatively from sailing, when a ship would touch the bottom, but then keep going. This is a “touch and go” situation, as it’s describing a situation that’s pretty dodgy.
The wheels touching in this example doesn’t sound right to me.
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Thomas
July 24th, 2007 at
8:18 am
“Touch and Go’s” by pilots aren’t always done in response to a bad/botched landing approach. Often, a relatively new pilot will practice touch-and-go’s deliberately to improve his/her landing skills.
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nez
July 24th, 2007 at
10:19 am
way back when, people used to drink alcohol from lead goblets …this lead to led poisoning and resulted in people passing out for days, those people would often be mistaken for dead, so to help prevent false readings, they held a “WAKE” where the body would lie out for a few days to see if the poor guy would wake. If they did not, the funeral went on as normal and they were buried. At this time sometimes bodies would be dug up and scratch marks would be found on casket roofs revealing people that had drank the alcohol+lead concoction and been buried alive. So to help prevent this, after a person was buried, they attached a bell to a string from tombstone to casket, so if some poor guy was in fact, buried alive, they could pull the string and alert the caretaker. This was called a “DEAD RINGER.” The caretaker that was watching for DEAD RINGERs was working the first ever “GRAVEYARD SHIFT.” …funny how phrases are created
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Steve
July 24th, 2007 at
2:02 pm
“BEAT THE RAP … originated in anther expression”
typo: “anther” should be “another”
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subcorpus
July 24th, 2007 at
4:43 pm
read the article … it was good …
read the comments … it was kinda better …
kewl read … -
Nemo
July 24th, 2007 at
6:30 pm
Others have already pointed out some errors; here are some more.
“In hock” does not come from the game faro, but from a Dutch word, hok, which was a slang word for prison, and by extension, debt.
“Botch” has nothing to do with chairs per se. It comes from a Middle English word, bocchen, meaning “to mend/patch” (and later “to do a job in patchwork fashion”).
“Beat the rap” is indeed American, and dates to 1865, but “rap” was used by itself to refer to a *false* charge; so the explanation here has things precisely the wrong way around.
Given that the earliest attested uses of the expression “paint the town red” come from New York and Boston in the 1880s (not from Melton Mowbray, sorry, though U.K. English did pick it up pretty quickly), there are no grounds for the explanation given here. (And there is *certainly* no connection with Roman practices, and calling people “tard” isn’t going to persuade them otherwise.)
Others, however, about which people here have expressed doubts, are correct — such “stumped” and “pig in a poke”.
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Alex
July 28th, 2007 at
4:37 am
Thanks Steve - I’ve fixed the typo. Regarding whether these phrase origins are right or wrong, I think yndy’s comment nailed it.
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darren
July 30th, 2007 at
11:46 pm
‘Stave Off’ is wrong. A stave is a walking staff, or -to put it bluntly- a stick. This was a freely-available aid to walking and self-defence whilst travelling, to be had for the price of picking up a branch and getting all the sub-branches off. While a stave undoubtedly had it’s uses in bull-baiting (and quite possibly hen, ferret, badger and hamster baiting) the meaning is simply ‘to hold someone off with your stave’. Or staff. Or stick.
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Don Schimpff
December 16th, 2007 at
1:44 pm
Does anyone know the origin of “Don’t kid the goldfish”. ??? Mothers used it to let children know they were not telling the truth.
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who
January 9th, 2008 at
11:56 pm
I find both of the common explanations of “let the cat out of the bag” to be questionable. There have been enough objections to the nautical explanation so let me speak to the “pig” supposition.
How often would a seller be able to dupe his customers before he would be drawn and quartered (or tarred and feathered like the King and the Duke)? How many people would be buying a piglet the size of a cat? How many people would mistake the squealing of a piglet with the yowling of a cat? It doesn’t add up.
I would propose that the term would more likely have a trapping or hunting origin where if you are not careful you would let the prey (in this case a cat) escape from a bag or trap. Not so much letting a secret out but just letting something out that you hadn’t meant to let out. Any comments?
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