Phrases - Anna's Passion 
Anna's Passion 
From A Phrase A Week
http://www.phrases.org.uk/a-phrase-a-week/
An  accidental transposition of the initial sounds, or other parts, of two or more  words.
Origin
The Rev.  William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), who was a fellow and warden of New  College, Oxford, is inextricably linked with the slips of the tongue that bear  his name. Spooner was an albino and, more to the point for this piece, a  sufferer of dysgraphia, which is a form of dyslexia that is characterised in the  OED as 'a disturbance of the clear distinction of the sounds of words, confusion  between closely related phonemes'. The albinoism may in fact have played a part  in this as it is often associated with poor eyesight, which was certainly a  symptom in Spooner's case.
Although  his reputation for making what came to be called spoonerisms was widespread,  most of the best known examples are inventions by others and it is impossible to  tell which are genuine mistakes (by Spooner or otherwise) and which are made up  for effect. For example, he is supposed to have said "I am a birdwatcher", which  would un-spoonerise as 'I am a word botcher'. An excellent comic example should  he ever have said it but, sadly, he didn't. The term 'spoonerism' was known  colloquially in Oxford in his lifetime and was first written down in this piece  from the London newspaper The  Globe, February 1900:
To    one unacquainted with technical terms it sounds as if the speaker were guilty    of a spoonerism.
The  good reverend gained both fame in his lifetime and linguistic immortality by the  eponymous gaffes, which his otherwise unexceptional academic career wouldn't  have brought him. Nevertheless, he didn't welcome his notoriety and in later  life became rather cross about it. At a college dinner given in his honour on  his retirement the undergraduates called for a speech; Spooner stood up and  said, "You want me to say one of those things; but I shan't", and sat down.
As  far as can be ascertained, the only example of a spoonerism actually said by  Spooner is:
You    will find as you grow older that the weight of rages will press harder and    harder upon the employer.
He  is also widely reported to have acknowledged coinage of 'The Kinquering Congs  Their Titles Take' (in reference to a hymn) but I can find no convincing  evidence of that admission.
Spooner's  reputation must have come from somewhere and, although no doubt exaggerated by  Oxford undergraduates who had developed a fashion for nonsense-speak in the late  18th century, he probably uttered other examples that went unrecorded. More  reliable are the accounts of ideas or words that demonstrate the occasional  transpositions caused by his mild mental disorder:
On    one occasion he spilt salt on the tablecloth and poured claret on top of    it.
On    a tour of his college he remarked on the darkness of a staircase before    turning off all the lights and attempting to lead a party down the stairs in    the dark.
He    asked an acquaintance "Was it you or your brother who was killed in the    war?"
Commenting    on another acquaintance he remarked "Her late husband, you know, a very sad    death - eaten by missionaries - poor soul!"
Here's  a list of spoonerisms that are often supposed to have been uttered by the  reverend gentleman but come with the giveaway 'attributed to' label:
You    have hissed all my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. Please    leave Oxford on the next town drain. (You have missed all my history lectures.    You have wasted a whole term. Please leave Oxford on the next down train.)
The    Lord is a shoving leopard (loving shepherd)
A    well-boiled icicle (well-oiled bicycle)
You    were fighting a liar in the quadrangle (lighting a fire)
Let    us raise our glasses to the queer old dean! (dear old queen, referring to    Queen Victoria)
From    Iceland’s greasy mountains (From Greenland’s icy mountains)
Dr.    Friend’s child (referring to a friend of a Dr. Child)
Is    it kisstomary to cuss the bride? (customary to kiss)
A    blushing crow. (crushing blow)
Is    the bean dizzy? (Dean busy)
Someone    is occupewing my pie, please sew me to another sheet. (someone is occupying my    pew, please show me to another seat.)
A    nosey little cook. (cozy little nook).
As  to spoonerisms unambiguously invented by others, they are legion. Here are a  few:
Annual    shower flow (annual flower show)
Bad salad (sad ballad)
Wave    the sails (save the whales)
La-la land
A notional place characterized by fantasy, self-absorption  and blissful lack of touch with reality.
Origin
'La-la land' isn't listed on maps, but the label does refer  to a real place, that is, Los Angeles, which is of course widely referred to as  L.A. The expression has taken on a meaning built partly from the place name and  partly from the supposed frivolous and eccentric behaviour of the city's movie  community.
The term began to be used by the general public around the  late 1970s and both of the above sources of the expression are found in print in  1979:
Washington Post, 4th February - "Monday    night in Lalaland is not like Monday night in, say,    Washington."
Los Angeles Times, 28th July - "Heather was    in la-la land after drinking the LSD-spiked iced tea intended for    Diana."
Another  link between the phrase and Los Angeles was the 1984 film Beverly Hills Cop. In a scene  where Eddie Murphy's lead character Axel Foley was being criticised by fellow  cop Jeffrey Friedman, Foley stuck his fingers in his ears and sang "la la la" to  drown out the reproach:
Foley: I am not listening to you. 
Jeffrey: Great. Real mature. 
Foley: I am not listening to    Jeffrey, but he's still talking.
That gesture became something of a cliché amongst Hollywood  types for a few years.
Despite all the associations of 'la-la land' with late 20th  century Los Angeles, the earliest use of the expression in print is from long  ago and far away. A heading in the Los Angeles Times in January 1925 ran:
Miniature motor cars developed by French engineers amaze    American government. Commerce Department motor head home again; describes    one-man taxis in ‘La-La Land’.
Presumably, the author had in mind the phrase 'ooh-la-la',  which was in vogue as a recent import from France into the USA in 1925, when  that early form of 'La-la land' was coined. The phrase never caught on with that  meaning, although it might have come in handy as an alternative to the  "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" line that the The Simpsons' writer Ken Keeler  used to articulate the USA's prevailing anti-French sentiment in  1995.
Scapegoat
One who is blamed or punished for the sins of  others.
Origin
Scapegoat. Not a phrase you say? Quite right but,  like  lackadaisical  and  preposterous , it is so  close to being one that it deserves to be included here. A scapegoat is like  a  whipping boy , that is, one who  is unfairly given the blame, and in the latter's case also the punishment, for a  misdemeanour. It's a strange word though - why 'scapegoat'?
For the origin we need to look to the  Bible , specifically the  1530 Bible as translated by William Tyndale. In Leviticus 16 Tyndale described  the Mosaic ritual of the Day of Atonement, in which one of two goats was chosen  by lot to be sent alive into the wilderness, the sins of the people having been  symbolically laid upon it.:
And Aaron cast lottes ouer the gootes: one lotte for the    Lorde, and another for a scapegoote.
It is now generally  accepted that Tyndale got his translation of the Hebrew sources wrong. He  misread ʿăzāzel' in the original and translated it as 'ez ozel', literally 'the  goat that departs' or ‘the goote on which the lotte fell to scape’. Later  scholars corrected the mistake and 'scapegoat' doesn't appear in the Revised Version of 1884, which has ‘Azazel’ as a proper  name in the text, but by that time the word had already been established as a  commonplace word. So commonplace in fact that, in the way that 'gate' is now  added to form the name for any scandal, the 18th century gave us 'scape-horses',  'scape-rats' and 'scape-geese'.
As if Tyndale's invention of it wasn't enough, the poor old  scapegoat has suffered further at the hands of dodgy spellers. Before the word  got its correction in 1884 it had already been garbled in print into  'scrapegoat'. Richard and Maria Edgworth's Essay on Irish Bulls, 1803,  contains this:
Let us not make one nation the scrapegoat for all the    world. Let us hear no more of Irish witnesses, Irish bulls, and Irish    blunderers.
'Scrapegoat' is an early example of an eggcorn. If you  haven't come across eggcorns before they are well worth a look. They are  invented words that come about as mishearings of the original correct word but  which make some sort of sense. 'Eggcorn' is an example of itself in that it came  about as a mishearing of 'acorn' but which might seem intuitively correct as  acorns are egg-shaped.
'Scrapegoat' is now pretty well-established and can be found  in many printed sources. Bob Dylan, endlessly poetically inventive but not  overly concerned with grammatical propriety, used it in Ballad in Plain D,  1964:
Of the two sisters, I loved the young
With sensitive    instincts, she was the creative one
The constant scrapegoat, she was easily    undone
By the jealousy of others around her
Country bumpkin
An awkward, unsophisticated rustic; a clown
Origin
The speakers of English have a rich vocabulary to denote  stupidity - 'inane', 'foolish', laughable', 'ridiculous', 'absurd', 'dumb'...  the list goes on and on. There is another side to the coin - 'clever',  'intellectual', 'sharp', 'ingenious' etc. That is, unless you live in the  countryside. There are many words to indicate the dim-wittedness of rustics but  few to suggest their intelligence. To put it bluntly, as far as city slickers  are concerned, the countryside is where the thickos live. Those horny-handed  sons of the soil are variously called 'bumpkins', 'yokels', 'hicks' and  'hillbillies', and as you might imagine, these names didn't come out of the air,  each has a derivation.
A  'bumpkin' was originally the name that the English had for the Dutch, whom they  portrayed as small, comic and tubby. The word is derived from either the Dutch  'boomken', meaning ‘little tree’ or 'bommekijn', meaning ‘little barrel’. The  word came into English in the 16th century. Unsurprisingly, as the English at  the time couldn't even spell English words with any consistency, there wasn't a  consensus on how it should be spelled. The first example in print, by the  lexicographer Peter Levens in his 1570 rhyming dictionary, is 'bunkin'. The next  attempt, by Lord Windsor in 1658, went like this:
May I not looke more lyke a bumking than the    rest.
(and were the good Baron Windsor living today he might  want to have another go at that).
'Bumpkin' was the accepted spelling by the 18th century, by  which time the term just meant 'stupid fellow'. Bumpkins were downgraded to  'country bumpkins' by Lord Chesterfield in 1774 when he made this  observation:
A country bumpkin is ashamed when he comes into good    company.
Not that we really needed to import slang terms for rustics  from Holland, we had our own 'yokels'. The word yokel was derived as a name for  an ignorant rustic from the old dialect name for a green woodpecker. An early  example of it in print is found in the Morning Post, May  1820:
The great pugilistic match between Oliver and Painter, for    100 guineas, takes place on Monday. A purse of 25 guineas will also be given    to Teasdale and a yokel of his own weight.
Meanwhile, across the pond, hicks were emerging from the  undergrowth. Actually, although 'hick' is now a bona fide American term, it  travelled there from the UK. It came about via the habit of changing the first  letters of names in order to make a diminutive nickname. Robert became Bob,  William became Bill and Richard became Dick or Hick. The British  publication The New Dictionary  of the Canting Crew, 1699, defines 'Hick' thusly:
A silly Country Fellow.
In 1702 Richard Steele was good enough to bring that naming  method and 'bumpkin' together, in the comic playFuneral:
Richard Bumpkin! Ha! a perfect Country  Hick.
A rustic appellation that is certainly of US origin is  'hayseed'. It was coined by that most American of authors Herman Melville,  in Moby-Dick, 1851, in a  sequence where he suggests that a "country-bred... downright bumpkin" would fare  badly in a storm at sea:
Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps in    the first howling gale.
The formula 'rural resident' + 'shortened  nickname' was also used to derive the US term 'hillbilly'. There's not more  to be said about this name than the definition that the New York Journal printed in April 1900:
A Hill-Billie is a free and untrammelled white citizen of    Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can,    talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his    revolver as the fancy takes him.
So, the  UK prefers 'bumpkins' and 'yokels', while the US goes for 'hicks', 'hayseeds'  and 'hillbillies'. In 1994, when the writers of the Simpsons needed a resident  moronic character for the cartoon series, they went straight to the countryside.  Not a hick, hayseed or hillbilly though; they opted for Cleetus Spuckler, the  Slack-Jawed Yokel.
Pulling one's leg
To deceive someone in a humorous or playful way.
Origin
'You're pulling my leg' was a common slang expressions in  the 20th century, but is rather going out of use these days. It would be nice to  be able to say that I've discovered the origin of 'pulling your leg', which is  one of the holy grails of etymology. Regretfully, not. Nevertheless, I get asked  about the phrase often and it's worth investigating, so here goes.
To 'have your leg pulled' means to be misled or teased in a  mild and benign way. It is natural, or at least seems to be natural, as almost  everyone that claims to know the origin of the phrase does it, to locate its  source in a situation where an actual leg is pulled. But, like those other 'leg'  phrases ' an arm and a leg ', ' shake a leg ' and ' break a leg ', there's no  evidence to show that the limb in question when the phrase was coined was  anything other than imaginary.
The two most commonly repeated of the literal 'leg pulling'  theories are:
1. Thieves used to pull at people's legs to trip them and    then use the quarry's disorientation as an opportunity to rob them. This was    supposed to have taken place in 'Victorian London', 'medieval markets' or    anywhere else that the storyteller chooses to site the story. The lack of    consistency counts against this being correct - were it a genuine explanation    there wouldn't be a need to vary the location in the retelling. Needless to    say, as is always the case with this form of theory, the sort that the younger    amongst us might describe as 'random', there's no evidence to support    it.
2. Until 1783 Tyburn was the principal place of execution in    England. Many notables were hanged there, including Oliver Cromwell, although    he was blissfully unconcerned about it as he had spent the previous three    years buried in Westminster Abbey and had to be exhumed in order to attend.    The 'pulling my leg' theory is that people, the so called 'hangers on', were    hired at Tyburn executions to hang onto the victim's legs in order to give    them a quick end. The practice of 'hanging-on' might or might not have    happened, but the idea that it is the source of 'pulling one's leg' is    implausible and is generally discounted as folk-etymology. Firstly, it bears    no relation to the expression's meaning. Secondly, as we shall see, the    expression wasn't known during the centuries when public 'suspension' hangings    (as compared to 'long drop' hangings, which wouldn't have required hangers-on)    took place. It would seem odd for the phrase to have originated at hangings,    many of which were of celebrities and reported in minute detail, but not to    have been recorded in print at that time.
As to the actual origin of 'pulling my leg', I don't really  know, but I can provide an approximate date and location. Surprisingly to some,  who might think it sounds British, the phrase is American. It was coined in the  19th century and the first time it is found in print is in The diary of James Gallatin,  secretary to Albert Gallatin, a great peace maker, 1813-1827, recording an  incident that was said to have taken place in 1821:
Mr. Adams is not a man of great force or intelligence, but    his own opinion of himself is immense. I really think father, in a covert way,    pulls his leg. I know he thinks little of his talents and less of his    manners.
The diary was published in 1914 from notes Gallatin claimed  to have been given to him by his grandfather. It is now generally accepted to be  a fake and the contents invented by Gallatin. The use of the expression 'pulls  his leg', which isn't found anywhere else in print for many years, hardly adds  to the diary's claim of authenticity.
The real date of origin is more like 1880 and the earliest  example that I've found of it in print is from the Ohio newspaper The Newark Daily Advocate,  February, 1883:
It is now the correct thing to say that a man who has been    telling you preposterous lies has been "pulling your  leg."
The fact that the phrase needed to be explained to the  paper's readers is clear evidence that it was a neologism (as far as Newark,  Ohio was concerned at least) in 1883, so if that example isn't the earliest use  it must be close to it.
What is unequivocally  British is the extended version 'pull the other one, it's got bells on'. That of  course means 'don't try and fool me with that crazy story, I'm not that stupid'.  It has been in use in Britain since at least the 1960s, which is when the first  appearances in print are found. The 'bells' are probably a reference to a  jester's costume.
So, we don't know who coined 'pulling your leg', but I hope  this has gone some way to clarifying who didn't.
Horse-sense
Meaning
A robust form of common sense believed to be found in poorly  educated but shrewd people.
Origin
When faced with the task of coining a new phrase,  horses wouldn't seem to be the obvious choice of animal to act as a yardstick  for mental discernment. Owls, foxes or dolphins maybe, but not horses. Indeed,  the person who coined the term  horse feathers  (meaning nonsense, stupidity) went the  more conventional route in associating horses with a certain lack of refined  intellect.
Given the animal's important place in the lives of the  people of medieval England, where present-day English was largely formed, it's  not surprising that we now have  numerous expressions that refer to horses . These usually allude to the hefty, coarse or even vulgar nature  of the working hacks of the Middle Ages. This perceived lack of sophistication  is apparent in the way that rural language was formed. Any plant that resembled  another but was large and coarser would be known as horse-'plant name of  choice'. Here are a few examples (and there are many more):
Horse-daisy (country name for the Ox-eye    Daisy)
Horse-radish (a large root resembling a radish but with a fiery    taste)
Horse-gentian (a.k.a. Feverwort)
Horse-nettle    (Nightshade)
Horse-parsley (Alexanders - an outsize parsley-like plant    tasting of celery)
Likewise, in general  use, adding the prefix 'horse' was considered enough to render any item comic  (in the same way that Steve Coogan's 'monkey tennis' is inherently humorous).  Examples (and again there are many to choose from) are 'horse-fiddle' (a  watchman's ratchet or rattle) and 'horse-billiards' (a form of deck quoits using  a large wooden disc).
So why 'horse-sense', which seems to go against the usual  pattern? In fact, this expression came about in just the same way. The addition  of 'horse' to 'sense' was meant to convey an unsophisticated, country type of  sense. What is different is that, although the idea of an equine violin or  billiards table is ludicrous, 'country-sense' has value, being a common-sense  alternative to the high-falutin' claptrap of what we would now call 'men in  suits'.
As to where and when the phrase 'horse-sense' originated, my  horse-sense tends to lead me towards the wild west and plain-talking men in  cowboy hats. The expression is often attributed to the American writer James  Kirke Paulding, who wrote the novel Westward Ho! in 1832:
I'm for Dangerfield, though he hasn't got a white pocket    handkerchief, and though he can't play the piane [sic]. He's a man of good    strong horse sense.
In 1870 the New York magazine The Nation offered a corroborative view of the  expression's origin:
The new phrase - born in the West, we believe - of ‘horse-sense’, which is applied to the intellectual ability of men who exceed    others in practical wisdom.
In fact, we need to cross the Atlantic for the origin.  'Horse-sense' was coined nearer to the Devon town of Westward Ho! (incidentally,  this is the only place name in the UK that includes an exclamation mark) than to  Pauling's wild west. The English romantic novelist Evelyn Malcolm wrote a string  of novels in the 19th century, firmly set in Daphne du Maurier West Country  bodice-ripping territory. One of these was Forsaken; Love's Battle for  Heart, published in The London Story Paper, January 1805, which includes a reference to a  horny-handed son of the soil:
Lud, Bill Perkins has horse sense.
Or you may  just prefer to recross the pond for this definition of the expression,  attributed to W. C. Fields:
Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from    betting on people.
Get medieval
Use violence or extreme measures.
Origin
The expression 'get medieval' was coined in the USA is  fairly recent years. It joins a list of figurative phrases of the 'become crazy'  form. These include venerable expressions like ' go berserk ', ' run amok' , ' go haywire ' and, more  recently,  'go postal '.
The  allusion in 'get medieval' is clearly to the forms of torture that were in use  in the Middle Ages, the best-known of which was the rack. This grisly stretching  apparatus was used to extract retractions of faith from both Protestants and  Catholics during the 15th and 16th centuries in England. A notable victim was  Cutbert Simson, who is shown in the accompanying image, which records his  torture in 1558. He was probably relieved when he was released from the rack,  but not for long - he was burned at the stake soon afterwards.
The person who brought the phrase 'get medieval' to the  public's attention is Quentin Tarantino, who, with Roger Avary, wrote the  screenplay to the 1994 film Pulp Fiction. In the film, the  character Marsellus Wallace swears revenge on an attacker:
I ain't through with you by a damn sight. I'm gonna git    Medieval on your ass.
Tarantino leaves it to our imagination what the revenge will  be but, as Wallace says it is going to involve "a pair of pliers and a  blow-torch", we can assume a degree of unpleasantness.
Tarantino and Avary  didn't coin the phrase however. It was in occasional use by the 1970s. The  earliest use that I can find of it is in another form of pulp fiction, a cartoon  strip in the Ohio newspaper The Lima News, October 1971.  The cartoon suggests that the expression was then used to mean 'adopt  old-fashioned courtly values' rather than being a reference to extreme  violence.
She: ...Then should I turn chicken now? Should I hide from Mary Perkins because she might mean ... danger?
He: Naturally not. I get medieval from time to time. You must try to love me enough to overcome it, dearest.
Kettle of fish
Meaning
This expression is usually part of the phrases 'a fine  kettle of fish', 'a pretty kettle of fish' etc, which mean 'a muddle or awkward  state of affairs'.
The phrase 'a different/another/whole-new kettle of fish'  has a separate meaning, which is, 'an alternative; a different thing  altogether'.
Origin
Being English, I have a close association with kettles,  which are essential equipment for a custom that the English can still claim  world dominance, the making of 'a nice cup of tea'. As you may have realised,  the expression 'a kettle of fish' doesn't refer to tea-kettles but to the long  saucepans that have been used for centuries to poach whole salmon, namely  fish-kettles.
The noun 'kettle of fish'  is listed by several reference works as dating from 1745, although the earliest  actual citation of the term in print that I can find is in Thomas Newte's A Tour in England and Scotland in  1785:
"It is customary for the gentlemen who live near the Tweed    to entertain their neighbours and friends with a Fete Champetre, which they    call giving 'a kettle of fish'. Tents or marquees are pitched near the flowery    banks of the river... a fire is kindled, and live salmon thrown into boiling    kettles."
Incidentally, the two meanings of the verb 'poach', which  are 'steal game' and 'cook by simmering in water', both derive from the French  'pocher', which means 'put in a bag'. The 'stealing game' meaning is pretty  obviously connected with putting game into bags. The 'cook by boiling' is less  intuitive and derives from the poaching of eggs, in which the egg white forms a  pocket for the yolk. So, if a ne'er-do-well were to illegally take a salmon from  a river and boil it for his tea, he would be poaching in both senses.
The French term fête-champêtre, meaning 'rural feast', was  still in use at the 1780s to describe outdoor meals. The word 'picnic' (also  French - 'pique-nique') was introduced around that date but wasn't widely used  until a century or so later.
There's no obvious reason why a humdrum item of kitchen  equipment was singled out as the source of a phrase meaning 'muddle or mess'. It  may be an allusion to the confusion of bones, head and skin that is left in  fish-kettles after the fish has been eaten. In all likelihood there wasn't any  specific connection between the saucepans and muddle. It seems that 'kettle of  fish' was picked (who knows why) as a synonym for 'state of affairs', or simply  'thing' and then various prefixes added to convey meaning. The earliest uses of  the phrase, which apparently are examples of the 'muddle' meaning come from the  English novelist Henry Fielding. In The History of the Adventures of  Joseph Andrews, 1742, he writes:
"'Here's a pretty kettle of fish', cries Mrs.    Tow-wouse."
and, in The History of Tom Jones,  1749:
"Fine doings at my house! A rare kettle of fish I have    discovered at last."
Should there be any doubt about the meaning of the  expression in Fielding's uses of it, there's an unambiguous explanation of the  phrase in Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar  Tongue, 1811:
"When a person has perplexed his affairs in general, or    any particular business, he is said to have made a fine kettle of fish of    it."
'A different kettle of fish' is much later in origin than 'a  pretty kettle of fish' and is known only since the 1920s. It's quite pleasing  that, as far as etymology goes, 'a different kettle of fish' is a different  kettle of fish.
Shrinking violet
A shy or modest person.
Origin
Anyone  coming across the expression 'shrinking violet' for the first time might be  excused for being confused. You might wonder who Violet was and why she might  be, like Alice in Wonderland, telescoping down to the size of a guinea-pig. The  English language is chock-full of phrases that include people's names, for  example 'For Pete's sake', ' Davy Jones' locker ',  ' Jimmy Riddle ' and so on; and  there's a whole page of ' Jacks '. By and large, with  some notable exceptions like ' Sweet Fanny Adams ' and  ' Hobson's choice ', these don't  refer to real people. The violet in this case isn't an imaginary diffident woman  but a flower. As for the shrinking, we don't mean reducing in size but modestly  recoiling.
The Viola family of flowers includes violets and pansies,  which are polychrome extroverts that seem just the opposite of shy. Their  colourfulness makes them a favourite of municipal plantsmen around the world and  even the horticulturally challenged amongst you must have seen them adorning  park flowerbeds and traffic islands. However, the phrase 'shrinking violet' was  coined in the UK before selective breeding turned the plants into images of  steroidal blousiness. The native English violet (Viola odorata, known as the  wood violet) is, as seems appropriate for our small green island, a reclusive  and understated flower.
Fey Georgian  gentlemen like Keats and Shelley were disposed to wandering around woodland  composing poetry and it was a close friend of theirs who was doing just that  when he gave the ground-hugging Viola odorata the name 'shrinking violet'. In a  poetry magazine called The  Indicator, the poet and essayist Leigh Hunt drew attention to the modest  wood violet:
There was the buttercup, struggling from a white to a    dirty yellow; and a faint-coloured poppy; and here and there by the thorny    underwood a shrinking violet.
The expression may have originated as the lyrical name of a  flower rather than a person but it is now mainly used figuratively to describe  modest and introverted individuals. That figurative usage is first found in the  USA. An early example of the phrase's use in print comes from the Pennsylvania  newspaper The Titusville  Herald, November 1870. The rather sarcastic article is about the New York  businessman William Tweed, who was widely believed to have stolen large amounts  of public money:
...deputations of the tax payers of New York waiting upon    Mr. Tweed with the title-deeds of their mansions and the shrinking violet    Tweed begging them to pardon his rosy blushes. Can it be that he is a    humbug?
A search for 'shrinking violet' online these days brings up  links to a weight reduction method that women may use to magically 'reduce by a  dress size in one treatment', which nicely brings us back to where we  started.
Fifth estate
The fifth power in the land.
Origin
What we generally  mean by the word 'estate' these days is a large body of land, often one  surrounding a grand house. The best-known estate in my neck of the woods is the  35,000 acre Chatsworth estate in Derbyshire, designed by Capability Brown, and  it is a classic of its kind. The Duke of Devonshire, whose family seat is  Chatsworth, owns at least four other major properties, but when we talk of the  third, fourth, fifth etc. estates, we aren't referring to land but to an earlier  14th century meaning of the word, that is, 'power in the land'. The OED defines  that meaning of 'estate' as: "An order or class regarded as part of the body  politic, and as such participating in the government.".
The 2013 film The Fifth Estate presents online media, and specifically  the WikiLeaks website, as being 'the fifth estate'. This immediately raises the  question "what are the other four?". It would be nice, if a little pedestrian,  to give you a list and end it there. As so often with language, things aren't so  simple.
Firstly, five is rather an abundance of estates; we started  with three. In Works,  1380, the theologian John Wyclif declared that three estates were 'ordained by  God'. Given those credentials and Wyclif's religious views, it's not surprising  that he heads the list with the Clergy, followed by the Barons and Knights and  lastly the Commons. In time, after the concept of the three estates of power  became accepted, the wording was generally given as 1. Lords Spiritual; 2. Lords  Temporal; 3. Commons.
All was clear until 1559, when another religious John, the  Bishop of London John Aylmer, muddied the waters. He stated that the 'three  estates' were those required by parliament to enforce legislation, viz. the  Crown, the House of Lords and the House of Commons.
In the parliament hous you shal find these 3 estats. The    King or Quene, which representeth the Monarche. The noble men, which be the    Aristocratie. And the Burgesses and Knights the  Democratie.
So, by the 16th century, although there might have been some  dispute about what they were, there were three estates.
Move on to the 18th century and we get the notion of the  fourth estate. In our time this is generally regarded as being the press, in the  form of powerful press barons like Lord Beaverbrook (who actually was a baron  and is the source of the term 'press baron'), William Randolph Hearst and  latterly Rupert Murdoch. The novelist Henry Fielding was the first to refer to a  'fourth estate', in theCovent-Garden Journal 1752, but he didn't believe it to be  the press:
...that very large and powerful Body which form the fourth    Estate in this Community - The Mob.
Before we settled on media barons as the holders of the  fourth estate, various writers put forward 'the mob', 'William Cobbett' and  'Harper's Magazine' as candidates.
Likewise, just as various people were called 'the fifth  Beatle', there are various nominees for the title of 'fifth estate'. What people  really mean by the expressions 'fourth estate' and 'fifth estate' is 'a power in  the land that has emerged to rival the existing acknowledged powers'. What that  might be depends on time and place. In 1932, The Times reported that "radio has  been called the fifth estate.". By 1955 they were saying that "[Trades] Unions  are now the fifth estate of the realm.". Now it is a foot race between  WikiLeaks, social media, WWW etc. Once we have settled on a clear winner we will  presumably move on to the 'sixth estate'. Any suggestions?
Keep a stiff upper lip
Meaning
Remain resolute and unemotional in the face of adversity, or  even tragedy.
Origin
This is such a clichéd expression that it is difficult to  imagine doing anything else with a stiff upper lip apart from keeping it. If you  try to hold your upper lip stiff your facial expression will appear aloof and  unsmiling, betraying little of any feeling you might be experiencing. That  demeanour is the source of 'keep a stiff upper lip'. The phrase is similar to  ' bite the bullet ', ' keep you chin up ', and (to the  amusement of many Americans) ' keep you pecker up '. It has  become symbolic of the British, and particularly of the products of the English  public school system during the age of the British Empire. In those schools the  'play up and play the game' ethos was inculcated into the boys who went on to  rule the Empire. That 'do your duty and show no emotion' attitude was expressed  in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's The  Charge of the Light Brigade:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason    why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six    hundred.
In more recent years the stiff upper lip has gone out of  favour in the UK and British heroes have been able to show more emotion.  Footballers now cry when they lose and soldiers cry at comrades' funerals, both  of which would have been unthinkable before WWII.
So, where did  the 'stiff upper lip' originate? In 1963, P. G. Wodehouse published a novel  called Stiff Upper Lip,  Jeeves, and you can't get much more English than that.
Strange then that a phrase so strongly associated with the  UK should have originated in America. The first printed reference to it that I  know of is in the Massachusetts Spy, June  1815:
"I kept a stiff upper lip, and bought [a] license to sell    my goods."
That citation doesn't explicitly refer to keeping one's  emotions in check, but a slightly later one, from the Ohio newspaper The Huron Reflector, 1830,  makes the meaning unambiguous:
"I acknowledge I felt somehow queer about the bows; but I    kept a stiff upper lip, and when my turn came, and the Commodore of the Police    axed [sic] me how I come to be in such company... I felt a little    better."
The expression can be found in several US references from  the early 19th century and was commonplace there by 1844, which is the date of  the earliest example that I can find from a British source.
To kowtow to
To accept the authority of another; to act in a subservient  manner.
Origin
I've  understood the meaning of 'to kowtow to' for as long as I can remember but it is  only recently that I came to wonder how the expression originated. 'Kowtow'  (and, in case you've not come across it before, kowtow is pronounced to rhyme  with 'cow' + 'how') is an odd word and, for no better reason than the sound of  it, I thought it might have something to do with cows. Apparently  not.
'Kowtow' sounds odd to our ears because it is a Chinese  word. To kowtow is to kneel and touch the ground with the forehead as an act of  worship or submission. The practice first came to the attention of the  English-speaking world late in the 18th century, when westerners began to visit  China. The word is an Anglicised version of the Chinese 'kētóu', which derives  from 'kē' (knock')+ 'tóu' (head).
The British explorer Sir John Barrow was well placed to  observe kowtowing at first hand. In 1792 he was appointed as an aide to Viscount  Macartney, the British ambassador in Peking. Barrow subsequently  wroteTravels in China, 1804, in which he was the first to explain  kowtowing to the west:
The Chinese were determined they should be kept in the    constant practice of the koo-too, or ceremony of genuflexion and    prostration.
There were several degrees of kowtowing, depending on the  difference in rank of the participants, the highest level requiring a full face  down prostrate pose with arms held wide.
Macartney was given his £15,000 a year job as ambassador to head a trade mission to negotiate a deal  between Britain and China. In 1793 he was presented to Emperor Qianlong, or 'son  of heaven' as he preferred to be called, but the viscount pointedly refused to  perform the obligatory kowtow. To the disbelief of the aghast Chinese court,  Macartney would only go down on one knee, as he would to the British ruler. This  event was recorded by the satirical cartoonist Gillray. Qianlong left in a huff,  the trade mission was abandoned and Macartney was sacked.
Prices in the UK have increased about 500 times since 1793.  Macartney might have felt that he had retained his dignity but, had he known it  was going to cost him a £7.5 million a year job, he might have thought that a  quick kowtow would have been prudent.
Whistle-blower
Meaning
A person who tries to raise the alarm about a problem and  publicises it inside and/or outside of his/her organisation.
Origin
If  the number of phrases that make direct reference to whistles is anything to go  by, whistling looms large in the consciousness of the English-speaking peoples.  Examples are:
As clean as a whistle
You can whistle for    it
Similar activities, for instance humming, produce a much  shorter list.
'Whistle-blowers' are people who attempt to draw their  superiors' attention to something they believe to be wrong and, if they fail in  that attempt and if they feel strongly enough about the matter, go public. Such  folk may have been around for a long time but it is only recently that they have  been given a name.
The expression 'whistle blower' was used literally well  before it gained its current figurative meaning. Lots of people blew whistles;  hunters were said to ' whistle down the wind '  when they let their falcons loose to fly. Sailors, when needing a wind to free a  becalmed ship, would 'whistle for it'. The first profession to be labelled as  'whistle blowers' were the US police, who blew whistles to attract attention to  wrongdoing. An early example comes from the newspaperThe Janesville  Gazette, June 1883, in a story about a policeman who woke half the town in  order to forestall a riot:
Quiet was restored upon the arrival of the regular police    force, and ere the town clock had struck the midnight hour all had returned to    their homes. But the crowd of people were all willing to bet that McGinley was    the champion whistle blower in America.
More recently, football referees have also been called  'whistle blowers'.
The association with the blowing of whistles and the drawing  of attention to a misdemeanour has now been extended into figurative use. The  new use of the expression began in the 1960s and the earliest examples of its  use are found in journalistic reports of the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War,  in which several hundred civilians were murdered. Such a report, which was made  at the stage that newspapers were still reporting My Lai as an 'incident' and  'alleged massacre', was printed in the Lawton Constitutional,  December 1969. This dismissed Ronald Ridenhour, the GI that brought the story to  the public's attention, as a fortune hunter with a vested interest:
This "whistle-blower" has turned out to be a clever member    of the anti-war faction which has been using the alleged misconduct of a few    GIs to slander the American Army.
In the 19th century we had 'whistle blowers', in the 20th we  had 'whistle-blowers' and now we have 'whistleblowers'. This changing of an  expression into a word, with the intervening hyphenated phase, is one of the  most common ways we form new words. There are many examples, from Shakespeare's  coinages 'birthplace', 'bloodstained' and 'barefaced' (using just the Bs), to  more modern-day examples like 'beancounter' and 'bombshell' (and how long before  'modern-day' becomes 'modernday'?).
Search engines seem to have caught on to this mutation of  phrases into words very quickly. A Google image search for "whistle blower"  brings up pictures of people blowing whistles. A search for "whistleblower"  retrieves pictures of Bradley (a.k.a. Chelsea) Manning.
The black sheep of the family
Meaning
A disreputable or disgraced member of a family.
Origin
Old joke alert - let's just get this out of the way  before we begin:
Yokel 1: "Why do black sheep eat less than white    sheep?".
Yokel 2: "There aren't as many of them."
'Black  sheep' is rather an odd phrase to choose to epitomise worthlessness. Why sheep?  Black cats are supposed to be lucky and badgers, dolphins, pandas and penguins,  which are all primarily black, are considered cute. First thoughts might suggest  that it came about because of the linking of black things with bad things, which  is a long standing allusion in English texts - black mood, black looks or (where  I come from) the Black Country. It may also be because shepherds disliked black  sheep as their fleeces weren't suitable for dying and so were worth less than  those of white sheep.
In fact, it is more likely to have derived from a bit of  misinterpretation by the writers of early English Bibles. Myles Coverdale's 1535  Bible, which was the first complete bible printed in English, rendersGenesis  30:32 as:
‘All blacke shepe amonge the lambes’
which Coverdale had translated from a German source text.  Like bloggers and web publishers these days, the writers of early bibles copied  from each other without checking their sources. Other bibles have the text as ‘all the browne cattell among the sheepe’ or ‘every speckled and spotted sheep  and every black lamb’. In the original texts, the Genesis 30:32 story is that  the shepherd Jacob suggested that he remove any spotted, dark or otherwise  identifiable sheep or goats from his master's flock in order to be able to later  demonstrate that he hadn't stolen any white ones. The 'black sheep' were  actually a mark of integrity rather than disrepute.
The ' Chinese whispers ' of the early  bible versions caused the original meaning to become lost and confused readers  into the belief that the dark sheep were removed because they were  worthless.
The first record of 'black sheep' in a derogatory sense that  I can find in print is from an English Puritan who emigrated to America in 1635,  the appropriately named Thomas Shepard, in the evangelical text The Sincere Convert,  1640:
Cast out all the Prophane people among us, as drunkards,    swearers, whores, lyers, which the Scripture brands for blacke sheepe, and    condemnes them in a 100. places.
Meanwhile, back in England, black sheep maintained the same  status as black cats. The long-standing English country tradition that black  sheep are omens of good fortune remained until the 19th century. The Folk-Lore Record, 1878, included this piece:
"We speak figuratively of the one black sheep that is the    cause of sorrow in a family; but in its reality it is regarded by the Sussex    shepherd as an omen of good luck to his flock."
Baa, Baa, Black  Sheep is one of the oldest  English nursery rhymes and was first printed in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song  Book, circa 1744 and is certainly much older than the 18th century. The  original printed form is almost the same as the version familiar  today:
Bah, Bah a black Sheep,
Have you any Wool?
One    for the little Boy
That lives down the lane
Like most nursery rhymes, the interpretation of the text is  a source of debate. It has been suggested in recent years that it contains a  racial slur which, to this reader at least, seems speculative and based on  little more than it includes the word 'black'. If there is a negative  connotation it is that the rhyme may refer to the unpopular export tax on wool  imposed in 1275.
That country lore was overtaken by the figurative use of the  'black sheep' that we now commonly use.
Run the gauntlet
Meaning
To go through a series of criticisms or harsh treatments at  the hands of one's detractors.
Origin
Gauntlets are familiar to us today as the stout leather gloves used  for gardening and the like. Mediaeval gauntlets were made of even sterner stuff.  Gauntlets, or gantlettes, gauntelotes etc., formed part of suits of armour. They  were usually covered with plates of steel and were as useful for attack as for  defence. When a dispute arose involving a member of the English nobility who was  wealthy enough to own his own armour then he (it was always a he) would  literally 'throw down the gauntlet' as a challenge. That phrase is first  recorded in Hall's Chronicles  of Richard III, 1548:
"Makynge a proclamacion, that whosoeuer would saie that    kynge Richard was not lawefully kynge, he woulde fighte with hym at the    vtteraunce, and threwe downe his gauntlet."
Another ancient custom of British fighting men was a form  of punishment in which the culprit was made to run stripped to the waist between  two rows of men who whipped and beat him as he passed by. These beatings were  extremely severe and the victims often died as a result - and many of those that  didn't may well have wished they had, as survivors were sometimes executed  afterwards. This punishment is the source of the term 'running the gauntlet' and  was used by both the British army and navy.
It would be natural to assume that gauntlets were used in  the beatings and that 'running the gauntlet' derived from that. In fact, that's  not the case and neither the punishment nor the phrase have anything to do with  gauntlets, either military or horticultural.
The name of the brutal punishment was originally 'running  the gantelope'. Gantlope is an Anglicized form of the Swedish word 'gatlop', or  'gatu-lop', which refers to the gate of soldiers that the victim had to pass  through. The Ist Earl of Shaftsbury recorded the phrase in his Diary, 1646:
"Three were condemned to die, two to run the    gantelope."
It didn't take long for gantlope to migrate into ganlet, or  gauntlet - possibly as a result of a simple muddle over the similar-sounding  words or possibly because of the association with the use of gauntlets as  weapons and with the antagonism implicit in 'throwing down the  gauntlet'.
The earliest known record of the gantlet form of the phrase  is in Joseph Glanvill's The  Vanity of Dogmatizing, 1661:
"To print, is to run the gantlet, and to expose ones self    to the tongues strapado."
The first use of the currently used 'gauntlet' spelling  comes from the intriguingly named Increase Mather, in The History of King Philip's  War, 1676:
"They stripped them naked, and caused them to run the    Gauntlet."
Some writers, recognising that 'gauntlet' was used in error,  continued to use the 'gantelope' version into the 18th and 19th centuries - well  after the word was archaic and otherwise unused; for example, Henry Fielding  in The History of Tom Jones, a  Foundling , 1749:
"Some said he ought to be tied neck and heels; others that    he deserved to run the gantlope."
Any such attempts are now long abandoned and we are left  with a 'gauntlet' phrase that has nothing to do with gauntlets.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions
Meaning
The intention to engage in good acts often fails. The phrase  is also sometimes interpreted as meaning that good intentions may have unwanted  negative consequences. This second interpretation is at odds with early versions  of the proverb (see below).
Origin
The origin of almost all proverbs is shrouded by the mists  of time. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of claimants to the authorship of  'The road to hell is paved with good intentions'.
The expression is often attributed to the Cistercian abbot  Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 1153). This attribution was made by St  Francis de Sales in Correspondence: Lettres d'Amitié Spirituelle(written in 1640 and printed in 1980). The de Sales version was  'l'enfer est plein de bonnes volontés ou désirs', which translates as ‘hell is  full of good intentions and wishes’. The five hundred year gap and the fact that  the text isn't found in the works of St Bernard suggests that we can discount  Francis's account.
And... just when you've  waited five hundred years for one St. Bernard myth, along comes a second. St.  Bernard rescue dogs don't carry casks of brandy around their necks to give  drinks to people who are stranded in snowdrifts. That idea comes from a painting  by the popular Victorian painter Sir Edwin Landseer. His 1820 painting Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a  Distressed Traveller shows  such a scene and the image entered the public consciousness. However, Landseer  made it up, it never happened.
Back to the proverb. Early English versions don't refer to  the road to hell or suggest that such a road was paved, but simply state that  hell was filled with good intentions. In more recent times there is always a  mention of paving. This adaptation may have been influenced by Ecclesiasticus  20:10:
The way of sinners is made plain with stones, but at the    end thereof is the pit of hell.
The person who made the 'paved' version popular appears to  have been James Boswell in The  Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D.,1791, who is second favourite after Saint  Bernard as the suggested author of this proverb:
No saint, however, in the course of his religious warfare,    was more sensible of the unhappy failure of pious resolves, than Johnson. He    said one day, talking to an acquaintance on this subject, "Sir Hell is paved    with good intentions."
Johnson didn't coin the phrase however. In 1670, the English  theologian John Ray published A Collection of English  Proverbs, in which he used the version that Johnson later  quoted.
The 'road' element was added even later. The first time that  the complete proverb 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions' appears in  print is in Henry G. Bohn's A  Hand-book of Proverbs, 1855. Neither Bohn nor Ray claimed to have coined  the phrase, they were collectors, not originators.
As to who did coin the phrase. I intended to discover that  and to let you know but, regrettably, the road to hell is paved with good  intentions.
Put up your dukes
Put up your fists and prepare to fight.
Origin
The 'dukes' are the hands or fists. There doesn't appear to  be any obvious connection between 'dukes' and 'fists' so, before we get to 'put  up your dukes', we need an explanation of how the two words came to be linked.  The use of 'dukes' meaning 'hands' is first referred to in print in the mid 19th  century, in both England and the USA. The American soldier Samuel E. Chamberlain  used it in his memoir My  Confession, Recollections of a Rogue, circa 1859:
I landed a stinger on his "potatoe trap" with my left    "duke," drawing the "Claret" and "sending him to grass."
The most commonly repeated suggestion as to how 'dukes' came to mean  'fists' is that it derives from the Cockney rhyming slang - Duke of Yorks =  forks = fingers/hands.
At first sight this seems rather unlikely as the link  between forks and fingers is hardly intuitive. There is a clear connection  though - 'forks' had been a slang term for 'fingers/hands' since the 18th  century. It is recorded as slang for 'pickpocket' in Nathan Bailey's, Etymological English  Dictionary, 1737:
"FORK, a Pick-pocket. Lets Fork him; Let us pick that    Man's Pocket. It is done by thrusting the Fingers, strait, stiff, open and    very quick into the Pocket, and so closing them, hook what can be held between    them."
The term 'fork-out', meaning 'pay money', comes from the  same source and is recorded by 1831.
The earliest citation that I can find in print of the  expression 'put up your dukes' is in John C. Hotten's Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant,  and Vulgar Words, 1874, and this also supports the 'forks' = 'fingers'  notion:
"Dooks, or dukes, the hands, originally modification of    the rhyming slang 'Duke of Yorks,' forks = fingers, hands... The word is in    very common use among low folk. 'Put up your dooks' is a kind of invitation to    fight."
Alternatively, it is sometimes suggested that 'dukes' is of  Romany origin. This belief comes from the Romany word 'dookin', meaning fortune telling or palmistry.  H. Brandon, the editor of Poverty, Mendicity and  Crime, 1839, lists this  meaning in the book's glossary:
"Dookin - fortune telling."
The palmistry association does link 'dookin' with hands,  but, that aside, the evidence to support the Romany source is  lacking.
Another suggestion is that 'put up your dukes' derives as a  reference to the Marquis of Queensbury, who created the well-known 'Queensbury  Rules' for the regulation of boxing bouts. That's an appealing idea but, again,  there's no real evidence to support it and, as is obvious, Queensbury was a  marquis, not a duke.
Most Americans won't  realise that the expression 'duke it out', which is the US variant of 'put up  your dukes', is in all probability an homage to the favourite son of the ruler  who did all that he could to prevent the formation of the United States. The  ruler was of course the English King George III and the favoured son was Prince  Frederick, Duke of York and Albany.
[As an aside, if anyone has evidence to support the    rumour that the 1994 film 'The Madness of King George' was given that name in    the USA because 'The Madness of George III', which was the title of the    original play, might have made the poor Yanks think it was a sequel to 'The    Madness of George I' and 'The Madness of George II', I would love to see it.    Methinks that's probably an urban legend.]
George III was by no means mad, but he did overestimate the  abilities of the young prince. Despite having no particular military skills,  Frederick was made a field marshall and given control of the British Army. His  lack of expertise was lampooned in the nursery rhyme 'The Grand Old Duke of  York', which refers to his misuse of ten thousand troops in an engagement near  Flanders, in which he 'marched them up to the top of the hill and marched them  down again'. Despite Frederick's lack of aptitude, he did later institute  several useful military reforms. It is generally accepted that when someone  squares up for a fight and 'puts up his dukes' he is the duke that is being  alluded to.
Although the term 'duke' had been common in the USA since at  least 1859, 'duke it out' didn't occur until the 1960s. An early use was by  Garry Niver, in the The San  Mateo Times, May 1964:
"As expected, the Mid-Peninsula League baseball chase is    going right down to the wire. However, instead of two teams figuring to duke    it out for the coveted crown, there will be three."
Put the cart before the horse
Meaning
Reverse the accepted or logical order of things.
Origin
The accompanying horse and cart image looks preposterous.  That's as it should be as the word 'preposterous' entered the English language  precisely to describe such back to front imagery. Of course, 'pre' derives from  Latin and is a standard prefix, that is, it is 'at the front'. Likewise, the  Latin 'post' means 'at the back', so 'preposterous' actually denotes the normal  arrangement of things, with the front at the front and the back at the back.  'Postprerous' might have been a better choice of word but, like ' head over heels ', which also  makes no sense, it's too late to change now.
An early  reference to 'putting the cart before the horse' comes in George  Puttenham's The Arte of  English Poesie, 1589:
Ye haue another manner of disordered speach, when ye    misplace your words or clauses and set that before which should be behind. We    call it in English prouerbe, the cart before the horse, the Greeks call it    Histeron proteron, we name it the Preposterous.
He was probably referring back to, or possibly translating  directly from, a work by Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC) - On Friendship:
"We put the cart before the horse, and shut the stable    door when the steed is stolen, in defiance of the old  proverb."
A hysteron  proteron is a figure of  speech we inherited from the Greeks, in which the thing that should come second  is put first; for example, 'putting on one's shoes and socks'. It isn't  surprising that, when needing an Anglicised proverb to express that notion, the  English turned toward what they knew best, that is, agriculture, and in  particular, horses. There are more ' horse phrases ' in English than  those referring to any other animal, including 'man's best friends',  dogs.
The notion of things being the opposite of what they  rightfully should be seems to have played on the minds of the English at the  time when modern English began to be formed, that is, in the 16th century. It is  a common theme in Shakespeare and  The  Tempest , Macbeth  and  A  Midsummer Night's Dream  all contain 'world turned upside down'  magical elements.
Other 'back to front' English phrases include 'the tail is  wagging the dog', ' upside down ', ' topsy-turvy ' and ' inside out '.
Blind-man's buff
A game, in which a blindfolded player tries to catch  others.
Origin
Blind-man's buff has  been one of the most popular of children's games for centuries. In the most  commonly known version one player is blindfolded (or hooded in some countries)  and, after being turned around a few times for disorientation, has to catch one  of the others. The blindfolded player is usually taunted, struck and poked with  sticks, for the general amusement.
There are records of a variation of it being played in  pre-Christian Greece and almost every country has a form of it. In Europe alone  we find:
Italy - Mosca cieca (blind    fly).
Germany - Blindekuh (blind cow)
Sweden    - Blindbock (blind    buck)
Spain - Gallina ciega (blind hen)
France    - Colin-maillard (a name deriving from Jean    Colin-Maillard, a warrior who had his eyes gouged out during a battle, but    continued to fight, striking at random around him)
Even in Victorian England, where the game was especially  popular, both in the playground and as a parlour game for adults, the name  wasn't settled on. In addition to 'Blind-man's buff' it was variously called  'Hoodwink blind', 'Blind man's buffet' and 'Blind man's bluff'.
(In the Derbyshire  town of Chesterfield, just a few miles from where I sit and type, there's a  curtain and blinds shop called 'Blind man's bluff'. Not as famous as the  mediaeval twisted spire perhaps, but etymologically more  interesting.)
The 'bluff' version of the name is the result of a  mishearing and possibly also the alliteration with 'blind'. The 'buffet' version  seems odd too, as the game has nothing to do with offering party food to the  sightless, but that is in fact the correct name of the game. To 'buffet' is to  strike or to push, as is done in the game. The word 'buffet' isn't widely used  with that meaning any longer, although 'buffeting' is still called into use  whenever umbrellas or awnings are blown about in gales.
The first example of the game's name that I can find in  print is from a 1590 play by Robert Wilson entitled Three Ladies of  London:
Ile to my stall; Love, Lucre, Conscience, blindman buffe    to you all.
The 'buffet' version, although the source of the game's  name, isn't known in print until a few years later, in John Bramhall's religious  text Serpent Salve,  1643:
We goe to blind-man's buffet one with  another.
The game was often played at Christmas and the English  diarist Samuel Pepys referred to his wife playing the game in his diary entry  for Monday 26th December 1664:
...and so home to bed, where my people and wife    innocently at cards very merry, and I to bed, leaving them to their sport    and blindman’s buff.
Fool's errand
A pointless undertaking.
Origin
The description 'fool' is now often used as a contemptuous  insult, but in the Middle Ages it didn't have such negative connotations. A fool  then was a naive simpleton but regarded with respect and even admiration -  somewhat the way that 'the fool on the hill' is portrayed in The Beatles' song.  The numerous names and phrases that contain the word 'fool' generally refer to  how easy it is to dupe (or to fool if you like) a fool. Examples of this  are:
Fool's gold - a brassy    mineral that resembles gold.
Fool's paradise  - a state of euphoria based on false    hope.
Fool's parsley - Lesser Hemlock, a poisonous weed that resembles    parsley.
Fool's mate - a naive chess move that incurs checkmate in two    moves.
Fools rush in...  - a proverb indicating    the unworldly lack of caution shown by fools.
It has long been part of the initiation of new recruits to  send them on 'fool's errands'. A credulous beginner might be sent to the stores  to fetch a skyhook or a tin of striped paint. The first references to 'fool's  errand' come in texts from the 18th century. An early example is from the  Yorkshire-born clergyman Edmund Hickeringill's Priest-craft, 1705:
Did not the Pope send all the Princes in Christendom upon    a Fools Errand, to gain the Holy Land, that he might (as he did in their    absense) rob them of their territories.
Given that playing tricks on the simple-minded must have  been happening since Adam was a lad, it seems odd that 'fool's errand' didn't  emerge into the language until the 18th century. The reason for this is that  mediaeval England had a different name for the sport, which was a 'sleeveless  errand'. From the Tudor era to around the 1700s, 'sleeveless' was very commonly  used to mean 'futile' or 'trifling'. 'Sleeveless answers' were those that gave  no useful information and a 'sleeveless errand' was a fool's errand, often used  to get someone out of the way. The historian Raphael Holinshed used the  expression in Chronicles,  1577:
So as all men might thinke that his prince made small    account of him, to send him on such a slevelesse errand.
'Sleeveless' had also been used for centuries before with  the same meaning as now, that is, 'without sleeves', so it's reasonable to  assume that's where the 'futile' meaning of sleeveless derived. What's not  clear, and despite my best efforts I've not been able to find out, is why  'sleeveless' was used with that meaning. Such usage of the word has long since  died out and, although it's not difficult to make guesses at the link between  'sleeveless' and 'futile', to know the real truth of that derivation we may need  get aboard a time machine.
Play the race card
Meaning
To attempt to gain advantage in an election by pandering to  the electorate's racism. Also, more recently, to attempt to gain advantage by  drawing attention to one's race.
Origin
This term is now more often used in the USA than in other  countries. A 'race card' is the name of the card that lists the runners and  riders at horse races, but hat's not the race card being referred to in 'playing  the race card'. The expression alludes to the trump card in card games like  whist.
Following an influx of immigrants into the UK in the  1950/60s there was known to be a degree of racist discontent amongst the  predominantly white indigenous population. Reputable politicians avoided  acknowledging this openly but there was an informal gentlemen's agreement not to  benefit electorally by pandering to this racist element. Peter Griffiths, the  Conservative candidate for the parliamentary seat of Smethwick in the UK's 1964  General Election, was accused of using the slogan "If you want a n*****  neighbour - vote Labour", in an attempt to capitalize on the electorate's fears  of being 'swamped' by immigrants.
[Note: I've blanked out the 'n' word above, as many mail  suppliers would reject mail otherwise. In the original slogan it was freely  used.]
Whenever a phrase is seen to match the circumstances,  folk-etymologists (the jargon name that etymologists give to amateur  etymologists) are eager to make claims like "Peter Griffith coined the term in  1964". In fact, he didn't. It was later, once the phrase 'play the race card'  had become part of the language in the 1980s, that commentators wrote pieces  suggesting that Griffiths 'played the race card' in order to get elected. No one  said it at the time. This form of skewwhiff theorising is called  back-formation.
There is another  back-formation relating to the phrase 'play the race card' and although, like  all back-formations, it is an invented derivation, this one is more plausible  than most. In 1863, US President Abraham Lincoln issued an Emancipation Proclamation,  which proclaimed the freedom of black slaves in certain US states. The London  based magazine Punch didn't support Lincoln's tactic and published a satirical  cartoon entitled Abe Lincoln's  Last Card; Or, Rouge-et-Noir. The cartoon showed a card game between  Lincoln and a confederate soldier. Lincoln, in the form of the Devil, was about  to slam down the Ace of Spades, in the form of a black man's head, onto a tub of  dynamite. The implication was that Lincoln was making a reckless political and  military gamble by pronouncing slaves to be free. This wasn't the cartoonist  John Tenniel's finest hour; he was of course better known as the illustrator of  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (see ' off with his head ', ' grinning like a Cheshire Cat ', ' as dead as a dodo ' ,  ' jam tomorrow ' and ' as mad as a March hare ').
It would have been perfectly reasonable to say that Lincoln  was 'playing the race card' in that cartoon. However, no one did say it at the  time and the notion that the phrase derives from Lincoln's 'Last Card' cartoon  is erroneous.
The earliest example that I can find of the expression 'play  the race card' in print is from the Indiana newspaper the Kokomo Tribune, November  1989:
Judge [Alcee L.] Hastings has been playing the race card  ever since the F.B.I. closed in on him in 1982.
That usage, which refers to someone attempting to gain  advantage by drawing attention to their race, became commonplace in the USA  around the time of O. J. Simpson's trial for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson  and Ronald Goldman. Several US newspapers used the phrase to describe the  tactics of Simpson's defence lawyers; for example, this piece by Roger Simon  in The Daily Herald,  October 1995:
"Why was playing the race card necessary in order for O.    J. Simpson to go free? Because it was the only way for the defense to deal    with the massive physical evidence against him."
By hook or by crook
Meaning
By whatever means necessary - be they fair or  foul.
Origin
'Hook' is a word with many meanings and as a consequence it  appears in numerous English phases - 'get one's hooks into', 'hook, line and  sinker', 'on/off the hook', 'sling your hook' and, most notably, 'by hook or by  crook'. That last phrase is one of the holy grails of etymology; many people are  sure they know the derivation but, in truth, the origin is rather obscure. We  can be sure that it is a very old phrase and that it was in general use by the  late 14th century.
There may be examples of a form of the expression in the  writings of John Wyclif from around 1380, but scholars aren't sure of their  date. The first substantiated citation is from John Gower's Confessio Amantis, 1390.  :
What with hepe and what with croke they [false Witness and    Perjury] make her maister ofte winne.
[Hepe was the mediaeval name for a curved  billhook]
Gower didn't use the modern 'by hook or by crook' version of  the phrase, but it is clear that he was using the reference to hooks and crooks  in the same sense that we do now.
The earliest example of the modern usage of the phrase that  I can find is in Philip Stubbes' The Anatomie of Abuses,  1583:
Either by hooke or crooke, by night or  day.
As is my habit when the origin of a phrase is uncertain,  I'll present the most commonly suggested theories and leave the rest to  you:
Suggestion    number one is that 'by hook or by crook' derives from the custom in mediaeval    England of allowing peasants to take from royal forests whatever deadwood they    could pull down with a shepherd's crook or cut with a reaper's billhook. This    feudal custom was recorded in the 1820s by the English rural campaigner    William Cobbett, although the custom itself long predates that reference. 
Another commonly repeated suggestion is that the    phrase comes from the names of the villages of Hook Head and the nearby    Crooke, in Waterford, Ireland. Hook Head and Crooke are on opposite sides of    the Waterford channel and Cromwell (born 1599, died 1658) is reputed to have    said that Waterford would fall 'by Hook or by Crooke', that is, by a landing    of his army at one of those two places during the siege of the town in    1649/50.
A third suggestion is that the phrase derives    from the career of Sir George Croke, a celebrated English judge. Croke (or    Crook) was on the bench in the reign of Charles I (born 1600, died 1649) and    became popular for his refusal to accept the legality of a 'Ship Money' tax    imposed by Charles without the consent of Parliament. It was commonly said    that ship money "may be gotten by Hook [that is, by force], but not by    Crook".
It's worth saying at this point that suggestions two and  three look dubious. Both have clear links to 'by hook or by crook' but refer to  events that are later in date than the phrase's first uses in print. There are  other suggested theories too and, although 'wood gathering using hooks and  crooks' isn't a provable derivation, it has to be a strong favourite.
Dumb blonde
A conspicuously attractive but stupid blonde  woman.
Origin
I had it in mind that the expression 'dumb blonde'  originated in the silent movies of the early days of Hollywood, where female  actors like Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish looked on in mute adoration while  male heros saved the day. It didn't take much thought to realise that this  notion made little sense; all the characters in those films were 'dumb', not  just the women, and neither of the above mentioned were blonde. Nevertheless, my  initial guess turns out not to have been too far wide of the mark. The  expression was first used, in the USA, in the 1920s.
The 'stupid' meaning of the word 'dumb' has been more  popular in America than in other parts of the English-speaking world, but it was  first so used in England. 'Dumb blonde' is a disparaging term directed at a  woman but the first 'dumb' people were men. The expression 'dumb ox' long  predates 'dumb blonde' and was first applied to no less a luminary than the  taciturn theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas. This nickname was probably influenced  by Aquinas's quietness and as a corruption of the Dutch 'Dom', a prefix given to  religious dignitaries.
By the early 1920s various 'dumb' insults became fashionable  and 'dumb ox' (for men) and 'dumb bunny' and 'dumb Dora' (for women) were in use  in the US college scene. It didn't take long for wags to come up with 'dumb  belle' as another.
Here we'll take a little sideways journey to look at the origin of  the word 'dumbbell'. We now know dumbbells as the handheld weights used in gyms.  Rather an odd word when you think about it, but the following derivation  provides the explanation.
When large wheel-mounted peals of bells were introduced into  churches in the Middle Ages, it was found that ringing them was quite vigorous  exercise. Strength and fitness were as valued then as it is now and people used  the bells, with the clappers padded with cloth to stifle the ring, as an early  form of fitness machine. They were 'dumb' bells, hence 'dumbbells'.
Back to 'dumb blondes'... 'Dumbbells' wasn't an entirely  pointless tangent as 'dumb-bell blonde' was the initial form of 'dumb blonde'  and is found in US newspapers from around the mid-1920s, as in this example from  the Iowa Citizen,  December 1926:
Many capable, loyal, reliable sweethearts and wives are    deserted for the featherweights. Such a woman may be worth her weight in    rubies; but if you're only a mere man you are going to to prefer any dumb-bell    blonde.
The  spread of 'dumb blonde' imagery was no doubt influenced by Anita Loos' popular  novel Gentlemen Prefer  Blondes, which had been published the previous year, and the description of  Jean Harlow as the  Blonde Bombshell in her  1933 film, although the phrase 'dumb blonde' doesn't actually occur in  either.
Marilyn Monroe may be the stereotypical image of the 'dumb  blonde' for many people. In fact she was neither dumb nor blonde. Monroe was an  astute businesswoman who, capitalising in the fact that 1950s Hollywood really  did prefer blondes, turned the brunette Norma Jean Mortenson into a hugely  successful commercial asset.
Have a dekko 
Have a look.
Origin
Those of you who speak English but don't live in England may not have come across this expression before and even here it is now rather archaic. Nevertheless, I like to help keep such expressions alive, so here's the derivation...
'Dekko' is the usual spelling, but as it is a slang term derived from spoken language the spelling is somewhat arbitrary; sometimes 'decko', sometimes 'deko'. The proper spelling, which is virtually never used, is 'dekho'. The word, which we'll come to later, is one of the numerous examples that the British army harvested during the period of governance of India known as the British Raj (1858 - 1947). These include the everyday words:
Avatar 
Thug, typhoon 
Yoga
Those words were assimilated into English with their (more or less) correct spelling. The British soldiery also invented other words, formed from mangled mispronunciations of the Urdu or Hindi originals:
Blighty (England) - bilāyati (foreign, especially European)
Buckshee (free, without charge) - bakhshī (giver, paymaster)
Choky (jail) - chauki (shed)
Mulligatawny (soup) - miḷaku-taṇṇi (miḷaku black pepper + taṇṇi water)
Pukka (very good) - pakkā (cooked, ripe, substantial)
The British in India also appropriated words to form new phrases in English, for example:
Hobson-jobson (a version of the call 'Yā Ḥasan! Yā Ḥusayn!')
Go doolally  (from the place name Deolali)
Tickety-boo (from the Hindi 'ṭhīk hai', meaning  all right)
To that list we can add 'have a dekko'. 'Dekho' is a Hindi word meaning 'look'. The expression first began to be used by the British in India in the middle of the 19th century and soon migrated back home with soldiers on leave. The phrase was originally 'have a deck', which derived in the same way but which has now gone out of use. 'Have a dekko' is first found in print in January 1856 in an appropriate place - Allen's Indian Mail, a newspaper devoted to news of India and China aimed at the families of servicemen stationed there:
The natives of the place flock round, with open mouths and straining eyes, to have a dekko.
'Have a dekko' was (and is) used mostly in the London area, as are two other phrases with the same 'have a look' meaning - ' have a Captain Cook ' and 'have a butchers', which are both  rhyming slang  rather than foreign imports. 'Take a shufti', yet another London expression with the same meaning, is a better match for 'have a dekko', being a foreign word mispronounced by members of the British army, this time from the Arabic word 'šufti', meaning 'have you seen?'.
Another odd-sounding phrase in the British 'have a look' lexicon is 'have a gander'. This sounds as though it could be a mispronounciation of a foreign word or possibly rhyming slang. In fact, it's neither. It merely alludes to the bird's habit of stretching its neck high when looking for predators.
Heavy metal
Hard rock music, usually electric guitar-based and always loud.
Origin
'Heavy metal' seems at first a strange label to apply to a form of music. However, a little investigation into the symbolism behind the name reveals it to be a rather obvious choice.
'Heavy' was coined in the beatnik era of the 1950s to mean serious or profound and the term 'heavy music' was then and later applied to music in that vein. It's clear to see this meaning of heavy is derived from the usual meaning, that is, weighty or massive.
Okay, that's 'heavy' explained but why should a form of music be called metal? Well, most metals are heavy, especially the metals favoured by the bands who played that genre and used metals in their names, for example Led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly and Quicksilver Messenger Service (quicksilver is mercury). Also, the term 'heavy metals' in the chemical sense includes mercury, lead and cadmium, which have just the right image of toxicity to suit the musical style. So, both 'heavy' and 'metal' are suitable candidate words for this genre. Add to that the fact that heavy metal had already been widely used as a military term for heavily fortified tanks/guns etc. and it starts to look like an ideal choice as a label.
The first heavy metal bands, notably Black Sabbath/Ozzy Osbourne, Led Zeppelin and Judas Priest, hailed from Birmingham, which was then (sadly no longer) a principal centre of metal goods manufacturing in the UK. With the decline of that manufacturing tradition, most of the 'metal bashing', as it was known, is now done by these bands rather than by men with big hammers.
Birmingham was the first industrialised city in the world and this industry was centred around the factories and furnaces of the aptly named Black Country, described by the US Consul to the city in 1868 as "Black by day, red by night". Many of the members of the above groups worked in factories by day (Ozzy Osbourne was, for example, a horn tester in a car factory) and played in hard rock bands by night. It's hardly surprising that the music reflected the sights and sounds that the band members were surrounded by. Black Sabbath are generally accepted to be the first heavy metal band. They were originally called Earth after J. R. R Tolkien's mythical Middle Earth. Tolkien was a local boy and is thought to have based the region of Mordor on the Black Country. All in all, it's clear where the musical form heavy metal originated.
Although Ozzy and friends were playing heavy metal in the late 1960's/early 1970s, they didn't use that expression to describe it - for that we need to cross to the USA. The term 'heavy metal' first appears in print in William Burroughs' 1962 novel The Soft Machine. His character Uranian Willy is described as "the Heavy Metal Kid". Burroughs later re-used the term in his 1964 novel Nova Express:
"With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms - Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes - And the Insect People of Minraud with metal music."
It isn't clear who first appropriated the term to refer to loud rock music, although several lay claim to it. The widely quoted description of Jimi Hendrix's music as 'like listening to heavy metal falling from the sky', while being a fairly accurate assessment, isn't the earliest use of the phrase.
Some claim that the US rock music critic Lester Bangs, while working for Creem magazine, used the expression in 1968 to describe a performance of the band MC5 (Motor City Five), but I've been unable to find documentary evidence of that. Creem magazine themselves attribute the term to Mike Saunders, in an article about the 'Kingdom Come' album, by Sir Lord Baltimore, in the May 1971 edition of the magazine:
"This album is a far cry from the currently prevalent Grand Funk sludge, because Sir Lord Baltimore seems to have down pat most all the best heavy metal tricks in the book."
This has the benefit of being a traceable citation, as copies of the edition are still extant. So, until other hard evidence is found, that has to be the current strongest claim. It would be surprising if the term had never been used in the musical context before 1971 though - after all Steppenwolf used it in the lyric of their 1968 song Born to be Wild:
"I like smoke and lightning
Heavy metal thunder
Racin' with the wind
And the feelin' that I'm under"
The phrase may be American but the music was born, like my good self, in the 'jewel of the English Midlands' - the Black Country.
Acid test
A sure test, giving an incontestable result.
Origin
In the California Gold Rush in the second half of the 19th century, prospectors and dealers needed to be able to distinguish gold from base metal. The original acid test relied on nitric acid's ability to dissolve other metals more readily than gold. To confirm that a find was gold it was given 'the acid test'. A test sample was used to mark a touchstone and the degree to which it dissolved when the acid was added determined whether it was gold. Various other later tests also used acid and these are all called 'acid tests'.
The earliest citation I have found of a figurative use of the phrase (that is, one where no actual test is performed) is from the Wisconsin paper The Columbia Reporter, November 1845:
"Twenty-four years of service demonstrates his ability to stand the acid test, as Gibson’s Soap Polish has done for over thirty years."
A punning variant of the term arose in the 1960s hippy community. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters began holding 'Acid Test' parties in San Francisco in 1965. The attendees were serenaded by The Grateful Dead and given drinks of Kool-Aid spiked with lysergic acid diethylamide. 'Acid' was of course the colloquial name of LSD. It's not clear exactly what was being tested; survival possibly. The 'test' parties were referred to in Jefferson Airplane's 1965 A Song for All Seasons:
Since the acid test...
They say your drummer he's crazy as a loon 
Last night they found him baying at the moon 
For those who have never experienced the joys of Kool-Aid, with or without the mystery ingredient, it's a soft drink. Its original name was 'Fruit Smack'; perhaps that's what Kesey had in mind?
Bronx cheer
A sound of contempt or derision, made by blowing through closed lips.
Origin
The Bronx is a district of New York City, named after the 17th century Jonas Bronck, who was the first recorded European settler in the area. I don't usually resort to circumstantial evidence for the origin of a phrase, as all phrases and sayings have definitive origins and speculation doesn't have a place in etymology. Nevertheless, in this case it seems legitimate to bend the rule and make an informed guess, as it is hard to imagine how the expression 'Bronx cheer' might have originated other than as a reference to The Bronx.
'Bronx cheer' originated as a slang term in the USA in the early years of the 20th century and began appearing in newspapers from around 1920. The earliest example that I can find is in a newspaper report of an [American] football game between Princeton and Stagg's universities, written by no less a luminary that the US author Damon Runyon, in the Bridgeport Telegram, October 1921:
...if Chicago lose the east will grin and give western football the jolly old Bronx cheer.
Princeton is but a few miles from the Bronx and that early piece helps to legitimate the widely held view that 'Bronx cheer' originated at sporting events in the area. The New York Yankees stadium is most often said to have been the birthplace of the phrase. Other sources suggest it originated in Bronx theatres.
At that date England and America were two countries separated by a common language (as  George Bernard Shaw never said ) and in England a report like the one above would have surely substituted the word 'raspberry'. 'Bronx cheer' was included in an English-American Dictionary column that was printed in the English newspaper The Daily Mail in 1924, which was part of the Mail's regular attempts to keep their readers up to date with Americanisms, but the phrase never established itself over here.
'Blowing a raspberry' is essentially the same action as making a Bronx cheer. That expression is a little earlier and was coined at the end of the 19th century. It also has a popularly believed derivation, which may or may not be true. It is generally thought that the expression is a shortened version of the  Cockney rhyming slang  'raspberry tart' and, as the sound is an imitation of flatulence, I'll leave it to you to decide what 'tart' is supposed to rhyme with. Other explanations are that a raspberry comes from the shape of the lips when making the sound, or simply that it is a rasping sound.
Hobson's choice
Meaning
No real choice at all - the only options being to either accept or refuse the offer that is given to you.
Origin
Two options: take it or leave it; that's 'Hobson's choice'.
There is a story that this expression comes from a Mr. Hobson who hired out horses and gave his customers no choice as to which horse they could take. This has all the credentials of a ' folk etymology ' myth but, in this case, the derivation is correct.
A search of Google returns several thousand hits for 'Hobbesian choice'. The mistaken uses of that phrase, in place of the correct 'Hobson's choice', originate from a confusion between the celebrated philosopher Thomas Hobbes (who, incidentally, was the originator of another commonplace phrase - ' nasty, brutish and short ') and the less well-known carrier Thomas Hobson, to whom the phrase refers.
Thomas Hobson (1545–1631) ran a thriving carrier and horse rental business in Cambridge, England, around the turn of the 17th century. Hobson rented out horses, mainly to Cambridge University students, but refused to hire them out other than in the order he chose. The choice his customers were given was 'this or none'; quite literally, not their choice but Hobson's choice.
The phrase was already being described as proverbial less than thirty years after Hobson's death. The Quaker scholar Samuel Fisher referred to the phrase in his religious text, The Rustick's Alarm to the Rabbies, 1660:
"If in this Case there be no other (as the Proverb is) then Hobson's choice ... which is, chuse whether you will have this or none."
The Spectator, No. 509, 1712, explained how Hobson did business, which shows clearly how the phrase came into being:
"He lived in Cambridge, and observing that the Scholars rid hard, his manner was to keep a large Stable of Horses, ... when a Man came for a Horse, he was led into the Stable, where there was great Choice, but he obliged him to take the Horse which stood next to the Stable-Door; so that every Customer was alike well served according."
After his death in 1631, Hobson was remembered in verse by no less a figure than John Milton, saying "He had bin an immortall Carrier". That seems rather a strange thing to say just after he had died. Eighty-six was a very good innings in the 17th century, but hardly immortality.
The phrase was still well enough known in the 20th century for 'hobsons' to be adopted then as  Cockney rhyming slang  for 'voice'. It has no connection with the similar sounding 'Hobson-Jobson', which derived as a corruption by British soldiers in India of the Arabic street cry 'Yā Ḥasan! Yā Ḥusayn!' = 'O Hasan! O Husain!'' (Hasan and Husain were grandsons of Muhammad).
The most celebrated application of Hobson's choice in the 20th century was Henry Ford's offer of the Model-T Ford in ' any colour you like, so long as it's black '.
Joined at the hip
Origin
The evocative expression 'joined at the hip' derives from the situation of conjoined twins.
Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874) were a celebrated pair of conjoined twins and, being from Siam (as Thialand was then called), they are the source of the expression  Siamese twins . The pair were internationally known in their day and their celebrity has led many to assume that the term 'joined at the hip' also originated with them. This seems unlikely as the Bunker brothers were joined at the sternum, not the hip.
The figurative use of the phrase is American and dates from as recently as the 1960s. The earliest printed record of it that I can find is from the Californian newspaper the Pasadena Star-News, March 1963:
"The two organizations [Caltech and the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce] were so closely knit ... they were practically joined at the hip."
While it is clear that the expression derives from conjoined twins, we don't really know whether they were real or imagined and, if real, who they were. A pair of contenders from England are The Biddenden Maids.
In the English village of Biddenden, Kent, an annual dole of food and drink is made to the poor every Easter. Accounts vary on how long this has been going on but claims are made that it began after the death of conjoined twin sisters, who were born in Biddenden in 1100. Records show that the annual distribution is known to have taken place since at least 1605 and that, since at least 1775, the dole has included Biddenden cakes. These are hard biscuits that contain an image of twins, joined at the hip and shoulder. 
As with many old English folk traditions, it is impossible to separate fact from folklore and almost every aspect of the Biddenden Maids story is a source of dispute. Nevertheless, they are a pair of well-known twins who were 'joined at the hip'. Whether they were well-known in Pasadena in 1963 is a moot point. All the early figurative uses of the phrase are American and whoever coined it may just have been making a general, non-specific reference to conjoined twins. Sadly, until more evidence emerges, this is one of those phrases where we have to say, 'we just don't know'.
Common sense
Meaning
Good practical sense. The natural intelligence that is believed to be available to all rational people.
Origin
Thomas Paine published a pamphlet entitled Common Sense in January 1776. It called for America to become independent of Britain and a copy of the original is considered a treasure of the US Library of Congress, being one of the wellsprings of the thinking that founded the country. Common sense, that is, a plain practical 'get on with the job' philosophy is part of the American psyche.
Paine is sometimes thought to be American but in fact emigrated to the USA after living the majority of his life in the archetypally English country town of Thetford, Norfolk. Despite his radical views he considered himself English and the pamphlet's author was simply identified as "An Englishman". Nor, as is also sometimes believed, did he invent the term 'common sense', which had been in use in his native land long before Paine's day.
In the original 14th century meaning of the term, 'common sense' was a sense like our other senses. It was an internal feeling that was regarded as the common bond that united all the other human senses, the 'five wits' as they were known, and was something akin to what we now call 'heart'.
By the 16th century, the meaning had changed to be more like our present day meaning, that is, 'the plain wisdom that everyone possesses'. George Joye used the expression in Apology for William Tindale, 1535:
I am suer T[indale] is not so farre besydis his comon sencis as to saye the dead bodye hereth Cristis voyce.
[Note: 'apology' then meant 'defence against attack'/'justification of one's views', and was commonly used in the titles of scholarly disputes.]
The one thing that is usually said about common sense is that it isn't as common as it ought to be. This little gag was made as early as 1726, by the political writer Nicholas Amhurst in the satirical text The Secret History of the University of Oxford:
There is not (said a shrewd wag) a more uncommon thing in the world than common sense.
By the time that Paine began writing in the 1770s, the term 'common sense' had migrated a little more and was widely used to mean 'primary truth', that is, the unquestionable beliefs that all people receive from their experience of being alive. Richard Price defined the term in Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, 1758:
 Common sense, the faculty of self-evident truths.
Paine's work influenced many political and moral thinkers at the beginning of the American Revolution and he was personally acquainted with most of them; in England, these included the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the artist William Blake and in America, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
When the authors of the US Declaration of Independence began with the words "We hold these truths to be self-evident...", their meaning was 'we believe this declaration to be common sense'.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater
Meaning
Don't discard something valuable along with something undesirable.
Origin
Proverbs  are intended to pass on popular wisdom and are frequently expressed as warnings - ' don't count your chickens ', ' don't look a gift horse in the mouth ' and so on. To that list of don'ts we can add the odd-sounding 'don't throw the baby out with the bathwater'. Sadly, any discussion of the origin of this proverb has to refer to the nonsensical but apparently immortal email that circulates the Internet ' Life in the 1500s ' (or 1600s, as some variants have it). One of the claims in one version of that mail is that "in mediaeval times" people shared scarce bathwater and by the time that the baby was bathed the water was so murky that the baby was in danger of being thrown out unseen. Complete twaddle, of course.
What is unusual about this phrase is that, quite by chance, the mischievous author of 'Life in the 1500s' hit on a correct date - the proverb did originate in the 1500s. 'Throw the baby out with the bathwater' is a German proverb and the earliest printed reference to it, in Thomas Murner’s satirical work Narrenbeschwörung (Appeal to Fools), dates from 1512. Murner wrote in German of course, but we hardly need a translator as he was good enough to include a woodcut illustrating the proverb. The expression was part of everyday German language from then onward (as 'Schüttet das Kind mit dem Bade aus') but didn't emerge in English until the 19th century. The Scottish philosopher and German scholar Thomas Carlyle was well acquainted with German proverbs and translated it in an essay denouncing slavery entitled Occasional Discourse on the [N-word, see below] Question (written in 1849 and published in 1853):
And if true, it is important for us, in reference to this Negro Question and some others. The Germans say, “you must empty-out the bathing-tub, but not the baby along with it.” Fling-out your dirty water with all zeal, and set it careering down the kennels; but try if you can to keep the little child!
Despite going against the establishment view on slavery that was held in his day, Carlyle wasn't quite the freedom fighter we might imagine. His analogy compared the dirty bathwater to slavery (to be discarded) and the 'little child' to the useful service provided by the slave (to be kept). He suggested that "the Black gentleman is born to be a servant and is useful in God's creation only as a servant". What he in fact proposed was that servants should be hired for life, not sold as slaves.
The proverb, in the form of 'do not empty out the baby with the bath water', was in general use in English from the late 19th century onward.
Clog up
The leaves clogged up the  drain. 
The extra traffic made  the roads clog up.
Origin
People often send me suggestions  of the origins of phrases to add here. These range from the interesting and  erudite to the frankly bonkers. A recent proposition was 'clog up the works',  which was said could have derived from Luddite Dutch workers throwing their  clogs into machinery to wreck it. That sounded like classic folk-etymology but I  decided to look closer when I read that the French for clog is 'sabot' and that  was how 'saboteur' derived. That was certainly at the interesting end of the  scale and worth investigating.
The above story circulates in  various forms; the workers are either Dutch or French and the sabotage is said  to have taken place in either the 16th or the 17th century. As it turns out,  'sabotage' is a 20th century invention. The earliest known example of the word  in print is in a Reuters' report of a labour dispute in Paris in June, 1907,  published in the UK in the Manchester Courier:
M[onsieur] Bousquet solemnly    declared on oath that he had never recommended sabotage or  pillage.
The French word 'saboter' is  a verb meaning 'make a noise with sabots' and was generally applied to anyone  who clattered around like a bull in a china shop and generally fouled things up.  The original saboteurs were French dissidents, but they wore clogs rather than  threw them. The 'damaging machinery with footwear' source of the idiom 'clog up'  gets a  close but no cigar  award.
So, how did 'clog up'  originate?
To 14th century English peasants a  clog was a heavy block of wood. Oxen were 'clogged up' by fixing the blocks to  their feet to stop them straying. When shoemakers first hollowed out blocks of  wood to make footwear, 'clog' was the obvious name to go for. John Trevisa's  translation of de Glanville's Latin text De Proprietatibus Rerum,  1398, includes:
He feedeth and nourisheth oxen    and bindeth their feet ... and cloggeth them while they be in pasture and    leas.
That form of clogging developed  into our current use of the verb 'to clog' via several words of similar sound  and meaning. In the early 16th century 'clogged up' meant to be stuck in sticky  clay, literally 'clayed up'. This was a muddling of 'clog', 'clay' and 'clag'.  In this part of the world, that is Yorkshire, and I believe in other parts too,  sticky clay soil is called 'claggy'.
Later in the 16th century, 'clog  up' was used as we now use it, as a general term for 'impede/choke up'. This  came about by means of other muddlings, of 'clogging', 'clotting' and 'cloying'.  We might have opted for any of 'clay up', 'clag up', 'clot up' or 'cloy up' but  'clog up' got the nod.
Going back to the oxen,  it's clear that a 'clog' and a 'log' was the same thing, so the beasts might  just as well have been said to be 'logged up'. The change of language didn't  happen in the fields but it did inside the house. At Christmas we now burn (or  more often these days, eat) yule logs. When the first reveller decided to give a  name to the large block of wood burned at Christmas, it was a clog not a log.  Henry Bourne recorded this in The Antiquities of the Common  People, 1725:
Our Fore-Fathers were wont to    lay a Log of Wood upon the Fire, whlch they termed a Yule-Clog, or    Christmas-Block.
Hereabouts we have 'clog dancing'.  That might easily have turned into 'log dancing', which sounds much more  fun.
Scot free
Without incurring payment; or  escaping without punishment.
Origin
Dred Scott was a black  slave born in Virginia, USA in 1799. In several celebrated court cases, right up  to the USA Supreme Court in 1857, he attempted to gain his freedom. These cases  all failed but Scott was later made a free man by his so-called owners, the Blow  family. Knowing this, we might feel that we don't need to look further for the  origin of 'scott free'. Many people, especially in the USA, are convinced that  the phrase originated with the story of Dred Scott.
The etymology of this phrase shows  the danger of trying to prove a case on circumstantial evidence alone. In fact,  the phrase isn't 'scott free', it is 'scot free' and it has nothing to do with  Mr. Scott.
Given the reputation of Scotsmen  as being careful with their money we might look to Scotland for the origin of  'scot free'. Wrong again, but at least we are in the right part of the world  now. 'Scot' is a Scandinavian word for tax or payment. It came to the UK as a  form of redistributive taxation which was levied as early the 10th century as a  form of municipal poor relief.
'Scot' as a term for tax has been  used since then in various forms - Church scot, Rome scot, Soul scot and so on.  Whatever the tax, the phrase 'getting off scot free' simplyrefers to not paying  one's taxes.
No one likes paying tax and  people have been getting off scot free since at least the 11th century. The  first reference in print to 'scot free' is in the Writ of Edward the Confessor.  We don't have a precise date for the writ but Edward died in 1066, which is a  long time before Dred Scott.
The use of the figurative version  of the phrase, that is, one where no actual scot tax was paid but in which  someone escapes custody, began in the 16th century, as in this example from John  Maplet's natural history Green  Forest, 1567:
"Daniell scaped scotchfree by    Gods prouidence."
Scotchfree was a variant based on  a mishearing. An example of the currently used form, that is, 'scot free', comes  a few years later, in Robert Greene's The Historie of Dorastus and  Fawnia, 1588:
These and the like    considerations something daunted Pandosto his courage, so that hee was content    rather to put up a manifest injurie with peace, then hunt after revenge,    dishonor and losse; determining since Egistus had escaped  scot-free.
Plug ugly
Extremely ugly, usually of  people.
Origin
The Plug Uglies were a street gang operating out of  Baltimore, Maryland in the 1850s. The notoriousKnow Nothing Riot, in  which political and gang rivalries flared up into mob violence, took place in  Baltimore in 1856. Gangs called the Rip Raps, the Know Nothings and the Plug Uglies fought pitched battles in the streets  and these events were widely reported at the time. A contemporary newspaper  report also puts the gang in Washington in the following year. The New York Daily Times, June  1857, printed a report from a correspondent in Washington:
A gang of organized desperate    rowdies, some fifty in number, called the “Plug Uglies”, arrived here this    morning from Baltimore, for the purpose of defeating the Democratic ticket and    keeping naturalised citizens from the polls.
Later reports, notably Herbert  Ashbury's account Gangs of New  York, 1927, placed the Plug Uglies in New York. This is now disputed and  some historians regard Ashbury's account as semi-fictionalised. Newspaper  reports of New York City riots of 1857 only described the Plug Uglies as being  rivals of the participants rather than being participants themselves. However,  the appeal of the Plug Ugly name was too much for Martin Scorsese to resist when  he made the film Gangs of New  York in 2002, and he also  located them in New York.
'Plug-ugly' is an expression  mostly found in the USA. In other parts of the English-speaking world you are  just as likely to hear 'pug-ugly', which has the same meaning.
Pugs aren't the most  attractive of animals and many might say that only their mother could love them.  'Pug-ugly' seems as intuitive a coining as 'crystal-clear' or 'bone-dry'. It  seems reasonable to assume (and there's dangerous etymological talk) that one of  these phrases derived from the other, either as a deliberate play on words or  via a mishearing. Taking that assumption on, which came first, 'plug' or  'pug'?
It appears that 'plug-ugly' came  in first, although 'pug-ugly' ran it a close second. Even in some early reports  of the 'Plug-Uglies' in the Baltimore riots, the term 'pug-ugly' was included in  the text. The Milwaukee Daily  News, June 1857, described a 'pug-ugly' as a person with a brutish, swollen  face that was the result of being 'plugged', that is 'punched', by a member of  the Plug Ugly gang.
This leads us to look at the  various explanations of how the expression 'plug-ugly' was derived. Here you are  free to make your own choice. The theories include:
- The 'plugging' = 'punching'    derivation given in the 1857 newspaper.
- That the 'Plug-Ugly' gang wore    'Plug' hats, which were the name for headgear that was stuffed with paper and    pulled over the ears as protection.
- That the gang wore spiked    boots which they used to kick at victims, thereby 'plugging'  them.
As is usually the case with  derivations where, in truth, 'nobody knows', the list goes on.
Despite not  knowing where it came from, we do know what it means and the expression has been  in figurative (that is, lowercase) usage since the 1920s. P G Wodehouse,  possibly as a consequence of his frequent visits to the USA, used the phrase  frequently, as here in Bill  The Conqueror, 1924:
As plainly as if he carried a    sign, this man wore the word "plug-ugly" written all over  him.
Forlorn hope
A hopeless or desperate  enterprise.
Origin
Most of the phrases that are  explained on this site are idioms - the expressions that make English so rich  and enjoyable to converse in and, to the frustration of students of it as a  second language, so difficult to learn. Idioms can be defined as those phrases  that can't be understood from knowing what their constituent words mean. For  example, an English learner might know what skeletons and closets are, but still  scratch their head over 'a skeleton in the closet'. Alternatively, 'keep off the  grass' isn't an idiom as, if you know what 'keep off' and 'grass' mean, you  understand the expression. 'Forlorn hope' appears not to fit the definition of  idiom but, as we'll see, it turns out to be one.
Lack of hope must have been a  commonplace feeling amongst the English in the 19th century as they coined a  variety of literal phrases to express it - 'not a hope in Hell', 'some hopes',  'what a hope' etc. To that list we might expect to add 'forlorn hope' as, using  the above rationale, its meaning is defined by the literal meaning of 'forlorn'  and 'hope'.
'Forlorn hope' now just  means 'lost hope'. That's not how it was in the 16th century, when a forlorn  hope wasn't a world-weary feeling but a robust and  gung-ho  band of soldiers.
Each troop in the British Army had  a hand-picked group of soldiers, chosen for their ferocity and indifference to  risk (and occasionally by using that tried and tested military method of "I want  three volunteers. You, you and you."). They were the army's 'attack dogs' who  risked all in reckless death or glory raids on the enemy.
The Anglo-Norman terms  'avant-garde' and 'reregard', were adopted into English as 'vanguard' and  'rearguard' in the 14th century. They were the names of the forces that attacked  from the front and protected the rear respectively. It seems reasonable to  expect a group called the 'avant-garde' to have been the first into battle but,  before them, went the 'Forlorn Hope'. These soldiers, also called the 'forlorn  boys' or 'forlorn fellows', were given little hope of survival by their peers.  The first mention of them in print is found in Raphael Holinshed'sChronicles  of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, 1577:
Fortie or fiftie forlorne    boies.
Soon afterwards, the method of  attack was described in John Dymmok's A Treatise of Ireland, circa  1600:
Before the vantguarde    marched the forelorn hope consisting of 40 shott and 20 shorte weapons, with    order that they should not discharge vntil they presented theire peeces to the    rebel breasts in their trenches, and that sooddenly the shorte weapons should    enter the trenches  pell mell .
That's the militaristic side of  things, now back to the idiomatic. The equivalent group of combative soldiers of  the Dutch army were called the 'Verloren Hoop', literally 'lost troop'. A bit of  impromptu mistranslation amongst the British military turned this into 'Forlorn  Hope'. The British Navy took the mistranslation a step further and their wildmen  were known as the 'Flowing Hope'. The phrase was tortured still further and  those who were sacrificed whenever the rearguard was called on to retreat were  called the 'Rearlorn Hope'.
Although the original meaning of  'forlorn hope' is largely lost to us now, it was still in use in 1920 when John  Galsworthy wrote in The  Forsyte Saga:
"And round Crum were still    gathered a forlorn hope of blue-bloods with a plutocratic    following".
As time progressed, a forlorn hope  was thought of as something one experienced rather than something one belonged  to. The 'rearlorn hope' took no such linguistic journey and has stayed  exclusively within the army.
Bob's your uncle
Meaning
'Bob's your uncle' is an  archetypally English phrase and is so familiar here for it to have spawned jokey  variants. As 'take the Mickey' has an extended alternative 'extract the  Michael', 'Bob's your uncle' is sometimes extended to 'Robert's your auntie's  husband'. People in other English speaking countries won't be so familiar with  the phrase, so I'll give some examples that may explain the meaning.
'Bob's your uncle' is an  exclamation that is used when 'everything is alright' and the simple means of  obtaining the successful result is explained. For example, "left over right;  right over left, and Bob's your uncle - a reef knot" or, "she slipped the  officer £100 and, Bob's your uncle', she was off the charge".
Origin
'Bob's your uncle' is one of those  phrases that keep etymologists off the street corners. Despite it having been  the subject of considerable research, no one is sure of its origin. As with all  such mysteries there are plenty of suggestions, but I'll limit things here to  the most plausible three - the favourite, the second favourite and an  outsider:
1. Like many Victorian aristocrats, the 20th British Prime Minister  didn't lack for names and Viscount Cranborne's name - Robert Arthur Talbot  Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, was as full as his beard. For our  purposes here, we can cut that down to just 'Robert'.
'Bob's your uncle' is often said to derive from the supposed nepotism  of Lord Salisbury, who appointed a favourite nephew, Arthur Balfour, to several  political posts in the 1880s. Balfour went on to become Prime Minister after his  uncle, but his early political appointments were considered inappropriate as he  had shown no prior interest in public work. It is unlikely that Arthur Balfour  would ever have become a celebrated politician without the patronage of his  influential uncle. Piers Brendon, in Eminent Edwardians, 1979,  writes:
"In 1887, Balfour was    unexpectedly promoted to the vital front line post of Chief Secretary for    Ireland by his uncle Robert, Lord Salisbury."
The link here between an uncle Bob  who was Prime Minister and a 'Bob's your uncle' passport to a cushy life is easy  to make.The fact that the word 'nepotism' derives from 'nephew' makes the link  seem all the more neat. Such neatness is often the mark of a back-formation,  that is, an explanation that is made up after the event.
2. A second interpretation has it  that the phrase derives from the slang term 'all is bob', meaning 'all is well'.  That term is listed in Captain Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar  Tongue, 1785:
A shoplifter’s assistant, or one    that receives and carries off stolen goods. All is bob; all is  safe.
The slang word 'bob', meaning  'shoplifter's assistant', had been in circulation for some years at that time  and is defined as such in Nathan Bailey's Dictionary of Canting and Thieving  Slang, 1721. More generally, 'bob' was used as a generic name for 'person',  like 'Jack', 'Jill', 'Joe' etc. For example, public schoolboys who indulged in  land sports like cricket or rugby were called 'dry bobs' and those who preferred  boating were called 'wet bobs'.
3. The third potential source is  the music hall. The earliest known example of the phrase in print is in the bill  for a performance of a musical revue in Dundee called Bob's Your Uncle, which  appeared in the Scottish newspaper The Angus Evening  Telegraph in June  1924.
The expression also  formed part of the lyrics of a song written by John P. Long, and published in  1931 - Follow Your Uncle  Bob. The lyrics include:
Bob's your uncle
He knows what to do
He'll look after you
The song was sung and recorded by  Florrie Forde, the celebrated music hall artiste of the early 20th  century.
Eric Partridge lists it  in  A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional  English , 1937. He states it as dating from  circa 1890, although he presents no evidence for that.
The difficulty with the first two  suggested origins is the date. The phrase itself isn't recorded until the 1920s.  It would seem odd for a phrase to be coined about the nepotism of an uncle for  his nephew well after both Prime Ministers were out of office. The 'all is bob'  origin is from a century or so earlier and appears to have little reason to be  connected to 'Bob's your uncle' other than that they both contain the word  bob.
This isn't the first time that an  etymological outsider romps home when the favourites have fallen at the first  fence. We don't know for sure but, based on current knowledge, this classically  English expression may well prove to be Scottish and derive not from 10 Downing  Street but from the King's Theatre, Dundee.
In a nutshell
In a few words; concisely  stated.
Origin
The meaning of the  phrase 'in a nutshell' is fairly easy to deduce. Anything that could be written  in so few words that it would fit into a nutshell would have to be brief and to  the point.
The first text that was supposed  to be enclosed in a nutshell was far from small. Pliny the Elder recorded an  event, which he apparently believed to be genuine, in Natural History, the original of which was written in AD  77 and was translated into English in 1601 by Philemon Holland, who included  explanatory notes, like this:
We find in Histories almost    incredible examples of sharpness of the eyes. Cicero hath recorded, that the    poem of Homer called the Iliad, written on parchment, was enclosed within a    nutshell. The same writer maketh mention of one who could see to the distance    of 135 Miles.
Almost incredible? The Iliad  is about 700 pages of A4 text and in Homer's day would have been written on clay  tablets. This story seems to be an early example of  Chinese whispers , long before  that term was invented. Holland was translating a piece by the Greek author  Pliny the Elder, who had been told by someone that Cicero had seen a minutely  written version of a text by the Roman author Homer.
Shakespeare, who often took themes  from the classics, alluded to the 'something compact' idea of 'nutshell' when he  gave Hamlet the line:
I could be bounded in a    nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have    bad dreams.
The figurative use of 'in a  nutshell' to mean specifically 'in few concise words' didn't emerge until the  19th century. Thackeray used it in print in The Second Funeral of  Napoleon, 1841:
Here, then, in a nutshell, you    have the whole matter.
Squeezing books  as long as the Iliad into a nutshell was beyond the capability of an ancient  Roman with a stylus, but modern nanotechnology has made it straightforward. The  Bible seems to be the book that people favour these days for  microminiaturization. Many versions exist that would fit inside a walnut shell,  and some readable (with a microscope) texts can fit on a pinhead.
Sayings and phrases about March
The idea of March...
March. That makes it Spring in the  UK and, as is usual here at this time of year, the weather is madly changeable.  Yesterday, we had a beautifully sunny Spring day; today as I look out the window  I can see nothing but cold grey fog.
These days, changes in the weather  are taken care of by a click of the central heating thermostat. In earlier times  the weather meant much more and, as a consequence, featured heavily in our  language. Nothing expresses people's feelings better than the proverbs of the  day. As it happens, I am currently transcribing John Ray's monumental  glossary A Compleat Collection  of English Proverbs 4th Edition, 1768 [...and it is pretty much  'compleat' - pity the poor transcriber] and I had a look to see what the  English had to say about March in the 16th and 17th centuries. It seems that the  turning of the year from Winter to Spring and the unreliability of March weather  was much on their minds. Proverbs of the day include:
- March in Janiveer,    [January] Janiveer in March I fear.
- March hack ham, comes in    like a lion, goes out like a lamb. [Hack ham is a version of hackande,    meaning 'annoyingly']
- A bushel of March dust is worth a King's    ransom.
- March grass never did good.
- March winds and May fun, makes    clothes white and maid's dun. [Interpret this as you will. It appears to be    one that Ray was referring to in this disclaimer - "some Proverbs have given    offence to sober and pious persons, as favouring too much of obscenity, heing    apt to suggest impure fancies to corrupt minds."]
- March many    weathers. 
Other 'March' phrases that we are  still familiar with are ' Beware the Ides of March ' and ' the mad March hare '.
Knowing that March is generally  accepted to be derived from Mars, the Roman god of war, I wondered if 'March'  had anything to do with 'marching'. It turns out that it doesn't, but it is  connected to another of the many meanings of 'march', that is 'border country'.  This English borders with both Scotland and Wales were known as the Marches, and  this wasn't because they were marshy. There appears to have been some 'lost in  translation' business going on when 'march' was adopted into English from  French. The Old French for 'Mars' (Marz) and the Old French for 'boundry'  (marche) were thought to be the same word and came into English as 'March' and  'march'. That could also have been infuenced by March being the boundry between  Winter and Spring.
It's cold enough here today to be  the March of the penguins. Anyway, time marches on; back to  transcribing...
Swing the lead
To shirk one's labour; to  malinger.
Origin
I can recall that, as a child, I  was attracted to an explanation of the phrase 'swinging the lead' that went like  this:
Sailors used to use lines    weighted with lead in order to check how deep the water was beneath their    ships. The lazier mariners skimped on the task and just swung the lead in the    air, calling out a fictitious depth.
Many years on and, as an  etymologist, my heart doesn't exactly sing when I receive yet another email  starting with "I've always believed that...". It seems time to revisit that  explanation of 'swinging the lead' that I took on trust in my formative years  and to check the facts.
A good place to start with  research into nautical language is Admiral W. H. Smyth's Sailor's Word-Book, 1867. This  is a glossary of the terms and expressions used by British sailors, most of  which date from when 'Britannia ruled the waves', the 18th and 19th centuries.  It is clear that sailors did indeed measure the depth of water by dropping in  lines weighted with lead. The weights were called 'sounding leads' and Smyth  includes this entry:
Lead, Sounding : An instrument for discovering    the depth of water; it is a tapered cylinder of lead, of 7, 14 or 28 lbs.    weight, and attached, by means of a strop, to the lead-line, which is marked    at certain distances to ascertain the fathoms.
Deep-sea Lead: A    lead of a larger size, being from 28 to 56 lbs in weight, and attached to a    much longer line.
To Heave the    Lead: to throw it into the sea as far ahead as possible, if the ship is    underway.
The leads were  sometimes hollow and filled with tallow wax, so as to bring up particles of  whatever was on the sea floor, this being useful information to the ship's  helmsman. The ropes were knotted at six-foot (fathom) intervals and sounding was  also known as 'fathoming', that is. measuring in fathoms. This may be the source  of the term ' fathoming out '.
The depth of water is crucial to  sailors and, before the development of mechanical depth-sounders and, in the  20th century, SONAR echo-location, 'heaving the lead' was the only way of  determining it.
[Another bane of etymology is  the  false acronym . SONAR  is a genuine example of an early acronym, meaning 'SOund NAvigation and  Ranging'.]
The leadsmen's role was important  and physically demanding - they were called on to throw weights of up to 56 lbs  into the sea and then haul them up at frequent intervals. The notion that they  might have avoided the exertion of their task seems easy to believe. Counting  against it is the fact that they would have had little opportunity for deception  as they were supervised by officers and had to show the material that adhered to  the tallow to the ship's navigator.
You may have noticed that, while  Admiral Smyth mentions 'heaving the lead', he makes no mention of 'swinging the  lead'. Indeed, until the early 20th century, nor did anyone else - the phrase is  first recorded during WWI. In 1917, the magazine To-Day published this:1
"It is evident that he had    'swung the lead' (using Army phrase) until he got his  discharge."
It's possible that the phrase was  coined by soldiers in allusion to a supposed form of malingering by sailors. It  may also be that 'swing the lead' was a corruption of 'swing a leg', which was a  term previously used in both the British Army and Navy, with the same meaning.  What is certain is that 'swinging the lead' wasn't used by sailors themselves in  the days of sail.
And I had 'always believed  that'.... At least my childish belief, although it appears now to have been  overly gullible, did initiate an abiding curiosity about phrase  origins.
As dead as a doornail
Meaning
Dead, devoid of life (when applied  to people, plants or animals). Finished with, unusable (when applied to  inanimate objects).
Origin
This is old - at least 14th  century. There's a reference to it in print in 1350, a translation by William  Langland of the French poem Guillaume de  Palerne:
"For but ich haue bote of mi    bale I am ded as dorenayl."
Langland also used the expression  in the much more famous poem The Vision of William Concerning  Piers Plowman, circa 1362:
Fey withouten fait is febelore þen nouȝt, And ded as a dore-nayl. [Faith without works is feebler than    nothing, and dead as a doornail.]
The expression was in widespread  colloquial use in England by the 16th century, when Shakespeare gave these lines  to the rebel leader Jack Cade in King Henry VI, Part 2,  1592:
Look on me well: I have eat no    meat these five days; yet, come thou and thy five men, and if I do not leave    you all as dead as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass    more.
There are several 'as dead  as...' idioms, amongst the most notable examples being 'as dead as a dodo' and  'as dead as mutton'. Dodos and mutton are unquestionably dead, but why doornails  are cited as a particular example of deadness isn't so obvious.
Doornails are the large-headed  studs that were used in earlier times for strength and more recently as  decoration. The practice was to hammer the nail through and then bend the  protruding end over to secure it. This process, similar to riveting, was called  clenching. This may be the source of the 'deadness', as such a nail would be  unusable afterwards.
Doornails have been top of the 'as  dead as' pops since the 1300s. Perhaps it's time for a 21st century upgrade?  Given the ubiquity of digital downloads, I'll put in an early bid for 'as dead  as a DVD'.
Lick into shape
To transform a faulty object or  venture into something that works effectively.
Origin
You don't need to watch many 1950s  B-feature westerns before you come across some hapless cowpoke getting a  'licking'. That use of 'lick', i.e. 'thrash in a fight', is pretty much  restricted to the USA, although it did actually originate in England in the  1500s. Beating someone into shape sounds as though it might be the source of  'lick into shape' but it is in fact the common use of 'lick', i.e. 'pass the  tongue over', a meaning that dates from a few centuries earlier, that the phrase  alludes to.
The first example I can find of  the figurative use of the phrase is in Gilbert Burnet's An Exposition of the Thirty-nine  Articles of the Church of England, 1699:
"Men did not know how to mould    and frame it; but at last it was licked into shape."
'Lick into shape' sprang from the  belief held in mediaeval Europe that bear cubs were born shapeless and had to be  made into ursine form by their mother's licking. This belief is recorded in a  translation of Guillaume de Deguileville's The Pylgremage of the  Sowle. The fact that we have  a printed recorded of this expression is something of a close call as de  Deguileville's text was one of the very first books printed, by William Caxton,  around 1480. Caxton's print suggests that the translation was made in  1413.
"Beres ben brought forthe al    fowle and transformyd and after that by lyckynge of the fader and the moder    they ben brought in to theyr kyndely shap."
[Bears are born misshapen    and are subsequently formed into their natural shape by the licking of their    father and mother.]
That belief  seems rather naive to us now, but it isn't all that surprising in the context of  the Middle Ages. The general populace were uneducated and belief in supernatural  forces of all sorts was rife. The credence of stories of fabulous animals was  strengthened by the printing of bestiaries. These were books that showed  pictures of both real and imaginary creatures, so that the common people would  know what they looked like. One such bestiary was the Aberdeen Manuscript, circa  1542, which was made in order to:
"improve the minds of ordinary    people, in such a way that the soul will at least perceive physically things    which it has difficulty grasping mentally: that what they have difficulty    comprehending with their ears, they will perceive with their  eyes."
However, the writers of the books  had little more knowledge than their audience. To them, a zebra was no more real  than a unicorn. The authors merely lifted their pictures and explanations from  earlier works without checking the facts.
A whip round
Meaning
An impromptu collection of money  from a group of people, in order to fund some joint enterprise.
Origin
The sad spectacle of the alcoholic  ex-footballer Paul Gascoigne was reported in the UK press in February 2013, with  the accompanying reports that his celebrity friends had organised a 'whip round'  to fund his stay in a rehab clinic.
So, why is the collection of funds  called a whip round? This expression is very much 'made in England' as it  derives from fox hunting, the British Army and parliament.
In 19th century foxhunts, people  were employed to stop the hounds from straying by using whips to keep them in  place. Such people became known as 'whippers in' or simply 'whips'. This term  has been perpetuated in the British House of Commons where the word 'whip' again  does double duty, as it is both the name of the officers whose job it is to  guide straying MPs into the voting lobbies, that is, to 'whip up' enthusiasm for  a particular vote, and is also the name of the coercion process itself, which is  called 'the whip'.
Later in the 19th century, the  term began to be used in military officers' messes. John Camden Hotten described  this in the 1864 edition of The Slang  Dictionary:
Whip, after the usual allowance    of wine is drunk at mess, those who wish for more put a shilling each into a    glass handed round to procure a further supply.
It doesn't take much imagination  to see how the process became known as a 'whip round'. Although the process  began in officers' messes, it was used more widely whenever a request for group  funding was made. The first use of 'whip' in this wider context that I can find  is in Thomas Hughes' novel Tom  Brown at Oxford, 1861:
If they would stand a whip of    ten shillings a man, they might have a new boat.
The early use of 'whip  round' was almost coincident with that of 'whip', as is found in this piece from  a March 1863 edition ofThe Hampshire Advertiser, which gives a nice  illustration of the use of the term to mean 'a joint contribution to meet a  small debt':
In our last week's impression we    stated that the balance in the hands of the committee for carrying out the    Royal wedding festivities amounted to 30 shillings; it should have been    threepence. Two or three bills were overlooked at the time, so that instead of    of a balance in hand it will require a 'whip round' to settle these    bills.
[Note: the wedding being    referred to was the marriage, at Windsor, of Edward Prince of Wales to    Princess Alexandra of Denmark.]
It is perhaps a mark of social  change in the UK that, although the expression originated in the English upper  classes, it is now footballers rather than princes who merit a 'whip round'. I  can find no record of any collection to fund festivities when the present Prince  of Wales was married at Windsor in April 2005.
Higgledy-piggledy
Chaotic and disorderly; in jumbled  confusion
Origin
Reduplicated phrases  are those that use the  partial repetition of a word, often a nonsense word, for verbal effect.  'Higgledy-piggledy' is one of a number of such phrases that refer to chaos and  disorder. Other examples are ' helter-skelter ',  'harum-scarum',  pell-mell ', 'raggle-taggle',  hobson-jobson' and 'hurly-burly'. Why reduplication, especially of words  beginning with 'h', suggests jumble and disorder isn't clear.
Most reduplicated terms  involve the rhyming of words of two syllables -  hanky-panky ,  namby-pamby ,  mumbo-jumbo and so on.  'Higgledy-piggledy' is an unusual example that uses three-syllable words. In  fact, it's a little more unusual still - it's an example of a grammatical form  called a 'double dactyl'. A dactyl is a three-syllable word with the stress on  the first syllable and, not surprisingly, a double dactyl is a word made from  two dactyls put together. Examples of these are 'inconsequentially' and  'idiosyncrasy'. 'Higgledy-piggledy' is considered such a good example of a  double dactyl that it has given its name to a form of structured, some might say  tortured, poetic verse that uses double dactyls. I'll spare you a reprint of one  of those here; they aren't at the apex of the poet's art.
The first time that  'higgledy-piggledy' appears in print is in the first edition of John Florio's  English/Italian dictionary A  Worlde of Wordes, 1598:
Snatchingly, higledi-pigledie,    shiftingly.
The jury is out as  to whether the expression derives as a reference to pigs, but there's certainly  a pretty good case to be made for a porcine origin. The variant form of the  phrase, 'higly-pigly', although not found in print until 1664, seems to suggest  that 17th century authors linked the phrase to pigs. . If anything epitomises  'higgledy-piggledy' it's a herd of pigs. If I said I could actually prove that  the person who coined 'higgledy-piggledy' had pigs in mind I would be telling  porkies, but it seems highly likely.
Honest; genuine; fair  play.
Origin
There could hardly be a more Southern Hemisphere expression than  'fair dinkum'. The phrase, which is hardly used outside Australia and New  Zealand, conjures up images of horny-handed ranchers with corks on their hats. A  'fair-dinkum Aussie' is indeed what the locals call someone who embodies the  nation's values. So, where did the phrase originate? Alice Springs? Auckland?  No, Lincolnshire in England. That claim will take a little justifying,  especially to readers down under, so here goes.
Firstly, let's get out of the way  the folk-etymological tale that the phrase derives from the expression 'din  gum', used by Chinese miners with the meaning ‘real gold’. My Chinese is less  than perfect and I can't comment on whether or not 'real gold' is a correct  translation, but I can say that there's no evidence to link the phrase to China.  There is, however, a mining connection in the phrase's background.
'Dinkum' is a slang term that  appears to have grown up with two meanings, 'work' and 'fair play'. These may in  fact be drawn from one original meaning, that is, 'honest toil'. The 'work'  meaning of dinkum is found in print in documents from both Australia and the UK  in the late 19th century, the earliest being in the classic Australian  novel Robbery under Arms,  published by Thomas Alexander Browne, using the pseudonym Rolf Boldrewood, in  1888. It also appears in Sidney Addy's Glossary of Words Used in the  Neighbourhood of Sheffield, 1891:
‘I can stand plenty o' dincum.’ This word is used by colliers at Eckington. [Eckington is in East    Derbyshire]
The 'honesty' or 'fair play'  meaning is what people now mean by the phrase. The 'fair' was added to dinkum  for emphasis, much in the same way that it was added to 'square' to make  ' fair and square '. The 'fair  play' meaning was known in England from at least 1882, as in this example from a  report of a political meeting in Lincoln, reported in the Nottingham Evening  Post, February 1882. The paper reports the opinions of Richard Hall, a  local magistrate who was complaining about the unfair policies of the Gladstone  government, which he believed favoured the wealthy:
In all of these things he    thought there should be fair 'dinkum' to all classes of  people.
'Fair dinkum' also appeared in  Australia, in the Sydney newspaper The Bulletin, in  1894.
'Fair dinkum' was used by the  colliers of the UK's East Midlands from the 1880s and by Australians from a few  years later. In the late 19th century, in addition to the numerous criminals who  were transported, many mineworkers migrated from England to Australia, taking  their working language with them. Significantly as far as the derivation of this  phrase is concerned, the direction of migration was very much one way and few  migrants ever came back.
As thick as thieves
Close friends with; sharing  confidences.
Origin
We might expect 'as thick as  thieves' to be a variant of the other commonly used 'thick' simile ' as thick as two short planks '. The fact that the former expression originated as 'as thick as  two thieves' gives more weight to that expectation. As you may have guessed from  that lead in, the two phrases are entirely unconnected. The short planks are  thick in the 'stupid' sense of the word, whereas thieves aren't especially  stupid but are conspiratorial and that's the meaning of ' thick' in 'as thick as  thieves'.
'Thick' was first used to mean  'closely allied with' in the 18th century, as in this example from Richard  Twining's memoir Selected  Papers of the Twining Family, 1781:
Mr. Pacchicrotti was at Spa. He    and I were quite 'thick.' We rode together frequently. He drank tea with    me.
Like all 'as X as Y' similes, 'as  thick as thieves' depends on Y (thieves) being thought of as archetypally X  (thick). The thieves had some competition. Earlier versions were 'as thick  as'... 'inkle weavers', 'peas in a shell' and 'three in a bed', all of which  were examples of things that were especially intimate (inkle-weavers sat at  looms that were close together). These variants have now pretty much  disappeared, leaving the way clear for 'as thick as thieves'.
The association of  thieves with conspiratorial and secretive language was well established in  England in the 18th century. Many of those on the fringes of society, for  example poachers, homosexuals, street hawkers and thieves, used secret words and  phrases to converse furtively amongst themselves. Backslang was one example of  this, the best known survival of backslang being 'yob' for 'boy'. Several  lexicographers had published dictionaries used by those on the wrong side of the  law, notably the New  Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, 1698. The  'canting crew' were the various vagabonds and coney-catchers (conmen) that  inhabited the streets of British cities. The dictionary explained how to  decipher the language of "the tribes of gypsies, beggars, thieves, cheats etc.",  so that people could "secure their money and preserve their lives".
Given that thieves were  established as being 'thick' by the late 17th century it is surprising that 'as  thick as thieves' didn't emerge until a century or so later. The records of the  Old Bailey, which list transcripts of cases held there since 1674 and which  might be just the place to find this phrase, don't list it until 1874. The first  example that I can find of it in print is from the English newspaper The Morning Chronicle, in a  letter dated March 1827, published in February 1828:
Bill Morris and me are as thick    as two thieves.
So there you have it; proverbially  at least, planks are stupid but thieves (unless you include bankers)  aren't.
Lily-livered
Cowardly.
Origin
I suppose it is the job of idioms  to provide richness to the language by creating meaning that is different to the  literal meaning of the idiom's individual words. Almost any idiom serves as an  example - ' cloud cuckoo land ', ' fancy-free ', ' hat trick ' and so on, but  'lily-livered' must seem especially opaque to non-English speakers endeavouring  to learn the language. Why would that mean cowardly?
One clue is that our Middle Ages  predecessors believed the liver to be in control of our emotions. It was thought  to be the organ that created blood and that a poorly functioning liver was the  cause of mental or physical weakness. Anyone who was choleric, bilious or  irritable was labelled 'liverish'. There were numerous 'livery'  conditions:
liver-hearted, or lily-livered -    craven, cowardly
liver-faced - mean spirited
liver-lipped - pale and    feeble 
liver-sick -    suffering from dropsy, or the diseases we now call cirrhosis and    hepatitis.
By contrast, a robust liver  supplying ample blood was thought to create rosy cheeks glowing with ruddy good  health. References to 'ruddy' meaning 'healthy' date from the 14th  century.
The second part of the  explanation is that the lily was synonymous with whiteness. The White or Madonna  Lily seems to have a whiteness that is whiter than other whites and the plant  was grown in mediaeval gardens as a symbol of purity. In William Turners Herball, 1562,  the author referred to it like this:
The Lily hath a long stalk...    The flour is excedyng white.
In the same way as 'liver', 'lily'  has been used as a prefix in several descriptive terms, in this case describing  conditions that exemplfy purity or paleness - lily-cheeked, lily-fingered,  lily-handed, lily-wristed and so on.
So, putting the two adjectives  together we get 'lily-livered', that is, 'having a pale and bloodless  liver'.
Shakespeare appears to have coined  the phrase and, in Macbeth, 1623, when the Bard  needed to emphasize the fear and cowardice of a servant who was bringing the  king news of a military attack, he described the servant as 'a white-faced loon'  and gave Macbeth the line:
Go pricke thy face, and over-red    thy feare, Thou Lilly-liver'd Boy.
Union Jack
The popular name of the national  flag of the United Kingdom.
Origin
Two subjects that arouse passion  more than most are language and national identity and here in the UK these  collide at the name of the national flag. Spare a thought for my welfare as I  wade gingerly into a muddy pond teeming with crocodiles with an particular taste  for etymologists.
What's the flag called? It's the  Union Jack of course. Pause for an intake of breath amongst purists; "No, it's  the Union Flag!".
Whether you prefer 'flag' or  'jack', most agree on the union part of the name. I say 'most' as even calling  the place I live the United Kingdom will raise some hackles. I often get mail  along the lines of "You live in England! England, geddit, not the  UKay!".
Nevertheless, let's press on and try to explain the oddly named  standard, the Union Jack. The 'union' part is straightforward. The flag  originated as a visual representation of the various political unions of the  countries that formed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,  the present design being established in 1801.
(An aside for those who aren't  quite sure what Great Britain is. Britain is the little green island to the  north of France, originally called 'great' to distinguish it from what is now  called Brittany, which was in the Middle Ages also called Britain. Brittany is  now sometimes called Little Britain, which can be confusing as the popular TV  show, Little Britain was about Great Britain not Brittany ...and this little  tangent was supposed to clarify things. Let's get back to the  plot.)
The flag was formed by  photoshopping the crosses of the patron saints of England (red +), Scotland (white X blue background) and Ireland (red X)  - St. George St. Andrew and St. Patrick. Wales was already a principality of  England by this point so didn't get visual representation on the  flag.
So,  that's 'Union'. Now to the tricky part - 'jack' or 'flag'. To be quite proper  about it, it's the Union Flag. However, both Union Flag and Union Jack are  widely accepted and referring to the flag as the Union Jack has the advantage  that everyone around the world will know what you are talking about. The 'jack'  designation came about when the national flag was flown from the 'jack-staff' of  sailing ships. The jack-staff is a spar on the bow of a sailing ship and purists  will say that that is the only time that the flag should be called the Union  Jack is when it is flown from a ship's jack-staff. If you like you can opt for  uber-pedantry and call it the Union Jack Flag.
Now, I'd just better check that  image of the national flag is the right way up or I'll really be in  trouble.
Necessity is the mother of invention
Meaning
Difficult situations inspire  ingenious solutions.
Origin
The author of this proverbial  saying isn't known. It is sometimes ascribed to Plato, but no version of it can  be found (by me at least) in his works. It was known in England by the 16th  century, although at that point it must have been known to very few as it was  then documented in its Latin form rather than in English. Many well-known  proverbs appeared first in Latin and were transcribed into English by Erasmus  and others, often as training texts for latin scholars.
William Horman, the headmaster of  Winchester and Eton, included the Latin form 'Mater artium necessitas'  inVulgaria, a book of  aphorisms for the boys of the schools to learn by heart, which he published in  1519.
Roger Ascham came close to an  English version of the phrase in his manual on how to use a longbow, which is by  the way the first book ever written about archery, Toxophilus, 1545:
"Necessitie, the inuentour of    all goodnesse."
George Chapman also had a 'close  but no cigar' moment with his tragic play The Conspiracy and Tragedy of  Charles, Duke of Byron, 1608:
"The great Mother, Of all    productions (grave Necessity)."
The earliest actual usage of  'necessity is the mother of invention' that I can find in print is in Richard  Franck's 'Northern Memoirs, calculated for the meridian of Scotland'.  Originals of this text are difficult to locate, but it was republished in 1821,  with a foreword by Sir Walter Scott. The frontispiece of the reprint states that  the original was "writ in the year 1658". It contains this:
Art imitates Nature, and    Necessity is the Mother of Invention.
1658 seems the best date we have  as the birth of the phrase in English.
Frank Zappa gave this phrase an extra lease of life when he chose the  name of his inventive jazz/rock band in 1964 - The Mothers of Invention. His  use of 'mothers' clearly had a ribald meaning that Erasmus wouldn't have  approved of but Zappa did at least keep the expression from dropping into  'granny phrase' obscurity.
'Silly'  phrases
     Phrases that contain the word  'silly'
I have been watching the 30th  cricket Test series between England and India and musing about the oddly named  field positions 'Silly mid-on', 'Silly point' etc. I've watched enough cricket  to know that these are positions close to the batsman, but wondered why they are  labelled 'silly' and whether there might be an archaic 'near to' meaning of the  word. As it turns out, there isn't. 'Silly' in this context means what we  normally mean by the word, that is, 'foolish or empty-headed'. Anyone who has  been hit on the knee (or elsewhere) by a cricket ball will understand that  standing about six feet away from the batsman is just plain silly.
'Silly' may never have meant 'near  to' but it did take something of a journey to get to its present meaning. In the  15th century, when the word first began to be used in Middle English it meant  'deserving of pity, compassion, or sympathy'. A 'sylyman' wasn't stupid, just  unfortunate. Into the 16th century and into modern English and the meaning  migrated to mean 'weak, feeble, insignificant'. The naturalist John Maplet, in  the natural history A Greene  Forest, 1567, referred to a hedgerow bird like a sparrow as:
A smal sillie  Bird
Later that century 'silly' began  to be used with its current meaning. In the English/Italian dictionary Worlde of Wordes, 1598, the  Italian linguist John Florio described the Italian word for idiot as:
A sillie Iohn [man], a    gull, a noddie.
I'm not sure what it says about us  but there is a large number of words in English that denote stupidity. 'Silly',  perhaps because it conveys a form of good-humoured foolishness, appears to be a  particular favourite amongst the coiners of phrases. Here are a few, with their  derivations:
      Silly Season
The months of August and  September, when newspapers make up for the lack of real news by publishing  articles on trivial topics. This expression is older than one might think. The  US magazine The Saturday  Review was amongst the first  to make use of it, in July 1861:
We have, however, observed this    year very strong symptoms of the Silly Season of 1861 setting in a month or    two before its time.
      Ask a silly question...
... and you will get a silly  answer, of course. This appears to be an American phrase. The first mention that  I can find of it in print is from the Minnesota newspaper The Brainerd Daily Dispatch,  Tuesday, April, 1945:
If you want to ask a silly    question and get a silly answer, just ask Mona Roth whom she refers to as El    Dorado.
If any US readers can help me out  as to who Mona Roth was or what that citation is all about, please  do.
      Play silly b***ers
[Note: I've blanked  out the word above, otherwise many ISP's email filters, careful of your welfare,  wouldn't deliver this message.]
The esteemed lexicographer Eric  Partridge both defined and dated this British slang expression in the 1961  edition of the Dictionary of  Slang:
Silly b***ers, play, to indulge    in provocative horse-play; hence, to feign stupidity: low: since ca.    1920.
As is usually the case with  Partridge, he gives no supporting evidence for the date and I can't find any  actual examples of the phrase in print before the 1960s, even in its bowdlerised  form of 'play silly beggers'.  
      Silly Billy
It isn't often the case that a  name used in a phrase refers to a real person, but this one does. Silly Billy  was the 18th century nobleman Prince William Frederick, the second Duke of  Gloucester and Edinburgh. The diarist Joseph Romilly wrote of him in Romilly's Cambridge Diary,  1834:
He was in a towering passion for    a minute but soon got into a good humour by laughing at the D. of Gloster.    "Did you see silly Billy squirted on last night? it was worth £5."
What the Duke did to earn  the nickname I'm not entirely sure, although we can get a glimpse of his  character from a line in his biography - "He was an enthusiastic and brave, if  not terribly professional, soldier... renowned for his lack of intelligence".  Appearances can be deceptive but in all the paintings of him the eponymous Duke  doesn't look to be the sharpest knife in the box. It would be fitting if the  squirting referred to in the above quote was done with Silly String. Sadly not,  that was patented in the USA 1970.
That's all she wrote
An articulation of a sudden and  unforeseen end to one's hopes or plans.
Origin
This is very much an American  expression so let's begin with a clarification for readers in the UK where it  isn't in common use. The phrase is used to convey the meaning of 'it's all over;  there's no more to be said'. When seeking the expression's origin it would help  to know who 'she' was and what exactly it was that she wrote. As we shall see,  and as so often with etymology, that's not entirely clear.
The popular version of the origin  of this expression is that it is the punch line of a mournful tale about an  American GI serving overseas in WWII. The said sad serviceman is  supposed to have received a letter from his sweetheart. He reads it to his  colleagues: "Dear John". Well, go on, they say. "That's it; that's all she  wrote". The story is plausible; 'Dear John' was the standard cipher amongst the  US military for the kind of letter that has now been replaced by a 'you're so  dumped' text message.
The 'Dear John' usage came into  being at about the time of WWII. There are several references in 1940s  newspapers to 'Dear John' letters that were sent by Franklin Roosevelt, who is  sometimes credited with originating the term. These appear to be red herrings in  the search for the origin of the phrase and merely allude to letters that FDR  sent to prominent public figures who happened to be called John - John Lord  O'Brian and John Maynard Keynes for example.
The earliest example I can find  that refers to 'Dear John' letters with the commonplace meaning is from the  Florida newspaper the St.  Petersburg Times, March, 1944:
The things that brought tears to    their eyes included... the downcast GI about whom another told them "He just    got a Dear John letter."
Those citations give us an  approximate date for the emergence of the expression but not the actual source.  We may choose to believe the tale about the GI whose letter consisted of just  "Dear John" but there's no evidence of any sort to support it.
A more likely derivation is a country music song entitled  'That's All She Wrote', recorded by Ernest Tubb and published in sheet music  form in 1942:
I got a letter from my mama,    just a line or two
She said listen daddy your good girl's leavin'    you
That's all she wrote - didn't write no more
She'd left the gloom a    hanging round my front door.
[If you want to hear it, and  it is a classic of the country music genre, follow this link to  YouTube .]
Tubb may have picked up the  expression from popular usage but there aren't any examples of it from before  1942 and his version makes no reference to the military setting. Another  explanation, and this seems very likely, is that GIs heard the Tubb song on the  radio and adapted it to their circumstances.
An arm and a leg
Meaning
A large, possibly exorbitant,  amount of money.
Origin
'It cost and arm and a  leg' is one of those phrases that rank high in the 'I know where that comes  from' stories told at the local pub. In this case the tale is that portrait  painters used to charge more for larger paintings and that a head and shoulders  painting was the cheapest option, followed in price by one which included arms  and finally the top of the range 'legs and all' portrait. As so often with  popular etymologies, there's no truth in that story. Painters certainly did  charge more for large pictures, but there's no evidence to suggest they did so  by limb count. In any case the phrase is much more recent than the painting  origin would suggest.
It is in fact an American phrase,  coined sometime after WWII. The earliest citation I can find is from The Long Beach Independent,  December 1949:
Food Editor Beulah Karney has    more than 10 ideas for the homemaker who wants to say "Merry Christmas" and    not have it cost her an arm and a leg.
'Arm' and 'leg' are used as  examples of items that no one would consider selling other than at an enormous  price. It is a grim reality that, around that time, there were many US newspaper  reports of servicemen who had lost an arm and a leg in the recent war. It is  possible that the phrase originated in reference to the high cost paid by those  who suffered such amputations.
A more likely explanation is  that the expression derived from two earlier phrases: 'I would give my right arm  for...' and '[Even] if it takes a leg', which were both coined in the 19th  century. The earliest example that I can find of the former in print is from an  1849 edition of Sharpe's  London Journal:
He felt as if he could gladly    give his right arm to be cut off if it would make him, at once, old enough to    go and earn money instead of Lizzy.
The second phrase is American and  an early example of it is given in this heartfelt story from the Iowa newspaper  the Burlington Daily  Hawk-Eye, July 1875:
A man who owes five years    subscription to the Gazette is trying to stop his paper without paying up, and    the editor is going to grab that back pay if it takes a  leg.
Gussied up
Smartened up, in a showy or garish  way.
Origin
If you were to tell anyone in the  UK that they were 'gussied up' you would probably get back a blank stare - the  term is little known there. In the USA you might get a less welcome response, as  it is at best a back-handed compliment, referring as it does to a somewhat lurid  'trying too hard' appearance.
It would be nice at this juncture  to be able to point to some grande dame famous for her kitsch apparel who was  the source of the expression. Sadly, the plot is thicker than that and this  phrase's origin is uncertain. There are some clues though, so I'll itemize the  evidence and leave you to make what you can of it.
First, the word 'gussie'. This was  first used in Australia in the early 20th century as a name for a foppish dandy.  The Australian feminist novelist Miles Franklin used it in her best-known  work My Brilliant Career,  1901, to describe a soppy Lothario to whom she gives the unambiguous but mocking  name of Everard Grey:
"I'll show him    [Everard] I think no more of him than of the caterpillars on the old    tree there. I'm not a booby that will fall in love with every gussie I see. I    hate and detest men!"
'Gussie' was a contraction of the  name Augustus, which was the generic name for Roman emperors. In some contexts  the name might conjure up thoughts of imperial grandeur, but not so here. It  wouldn't have been a name commonly given to horny-handed Australian cobbers and  'gussie' was clearly meant to denote effeminacy, just as 'jessie' does now in  Australia and the UK. The New Zealand lexicographer Sidney Baker helpfully  removes the need for speculation by defining the word in the Popular Dictionary of Australian  Slang, 1941:
Gussie, an effeminate or    affected man.
'Gussie' is also found in US  publications, from a slightly later date, with the same meaning.
Onward, to 'gussie up'. This appears to be of American origin and, as  I've mentioned, has largely stayed in the US. The first example that I can find  of it in print is in the July 1945 edition of The Rotarian magazine:
The sky is a giddy blue, gussied    up with flounces of billowy white clouds.
How, why, or even if 'gussied up'  evolved from 'gussie' we don't now know. It could be as simple as the expression  just derived as meaning 'dressed like an effeminate man'.
Also playing a part in this is the  US tennis player Gertrude Augusta "Gussie" Moran. Known as Gorgeous Gussie, she was a top player in the late 1940s  but, after appearing at Wimbledon and other tournaments in frilly knickers, she  is now better remembered for her underwear than her overarm. She wasn't the  source of the phrase but if anyone could be said to have 'gussied up' the  previously staid tennis uniform it was she and the correspondence of her name  and appearance without doubt brought the expression into wider use.
Toast of the town
A person who is widely  admired.
Origin
As we know, toast is browned  bread. People began eating toast, or at least they began writing about it, in  the 15th century. The first reference to it in print is in a recipe for a  ghastly sounding concoction called Oyle Soppys (flavoured onions stewed in a  gallon of stale beer and a pint of oil) that dates from 1430. Toast wasn't  part of the recipe as such; the instructions were to serve the oyle soppys as  "hote as tostes". Actually, to say that our mediaeval ancestors ate toast isn't  quite correct. Like the batter on fried fish and the pastry on Cornish pasties,  which were originally just casings that were thrown away, toast was discarded  rather than eaten after it was used as a flavouring for drinks. Lodowick Lloyd's  text The Pilgrimage of  Princes, 1573, describes this:
Alphonsus tooke a toaste out of    his cuppe, and cast it to the Dogge.
As well as being a flavouring,  toast was used to warm drinks and most of the early citations refer to toast  being warm or hot. One of our oldest proverbs, as listed in John Heywood's  invaluable  A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the  prouerbes in the Englishe tongue, 1546, gives toast as a synonym for  hotness:
Love had appeerd in hym to her    alwase Hotte as a toste.
Even as late as the 17th century  people didn't eat toast but put it into drinks. Shakespeare gave this line to  Falstaff in The Merry Wives of  Windsor, 1616:
Go, fetch me a quart of Sacke,    put a tost in 't.
[In Shakespeare's day, as now,  sack was fortified wine similar to sherry, so a quart seems a generous measure  even for the notorious trencherman Sir John Falstaff.]
It isn't difficult to imagine  the scene in which some 18th century culinary innovator, having a piece of toast  and a drink served together, decided to eat the toast rather than submerging it.  Jonathan Swift appears to be the first to have recorded this novelty in print in  the poemPanegyrick on Dean, 1735:
Sweeten your Tea, and watch your    Toast.
As to the phrase 'the toast of the  town', this came about at the exclusively male drinking clubs of the early 18th  century. The 'toast' was the woman who was regarded as the reigning belle of the season. The chaps were invited to flavour and heat their wine with hot spiced  toasts and drink to 'the toast of the town'. The English Poet Laureate Colley  Cibber wrote about 'toasting' in the comic play Careless Husband,  1705:
Ay, Madam, it has been your    Life's whole Pride of late to be the Common Toast of every Publick    Table.
Later in the 1700s it became the  norm for any celebrated person, male or female, to be applauded by a  toast.
Coming more up to date the term  toast has taken a 180 degree change of direction. To 'be toast' is now hardly a  state to be desired. The usage 'you're toast' = 'you're as good as dead' derives  from the 1984 film Ghostbusters. The  scriptwriters wrote the line 'I'm gonna turn this guy into toast' but what Bill  Murray, in his role as Dr. Peter Venkman, said was "This chick is toast". It is  quite likely that the expression was US street slang that was taken up by the  Ghostbusters' writers, but the film is what propelled it into the popular  consciousness.
Spring forward, fall back
Meaning
Mnemonic relating to Daylight  Saving Time, indicating that clocks are moved forward an hour in spring and back  an hour in autumn.
Origin
Autumn is the time of year for  English wrinklies like me to bemoan the creeping Americanization of our culture,  as we see Bonfire Night being steadily superseded by Halloween. The ' penny for the guy ' of our youth has gone and been replaced by  trick or treat  and green-faced ghouls at our doors  demanding sweets. While finishing off the left-over sweets and transporting  myself back to Olde England when reading Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's  excellent novel set in Tudor England, I groaned again at her use of the American  'fall' to mean autumn. It's always advisable to have a stack of reference books  nearby when reading the esteemed Hilary's work and I checked the OED nestled  inside my iPad. I need not have grumbled; 'fall' is indeed a pucker Tudor word,  deriving from the phrase 'fall of the leaf', which is first found in print  in Toxophilus, 1545, an archery instruction manual by  Queen Elizabeth's tutor Roger Ascham, in which he lists the seasons  as:
Spring tyme, Somer, faule of the    leafe, and winter.
This became shortened to 'fall' a  century or so later, as in this example in the first known text on forestry,  John Evelyn's Sylva,  1664:
His [the Oak] leaves becoming    yellow at the fall, do commonly clothe it all the  winter.
'Fall' travelled to North America  with the early settlers and established itself there as the common name for  autumn. The word died out in the UK but has begun to re-colonize now due the the  take-up of the US expression 'spring forward, fall back' which we all use toward  the end of October when, using the old English parlance, 'the clocks go  back'.
Daylight Saving  Time, or Summer Time as it is called in the UK, is a European innovation. Some  claims are made for it being an idea that Benjamin Franklin had while staying in  Paris. That's not quite correct. Franklin did wake one morning at six o'clock to  be surprised to see his room in full sun. He scorned idleness and, in the  guise of Poor Richard, was the first to publish the proverb ' early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy  and wise '. His industrious mind set to work  and calculated that Parisians, by being active in the evening when it was dark  and in bed in the morning when it was light, spent 96,075,000 livres tournois  [the French currency of the day] more than they need to on candle wax.  His suggestion wasn't to change the clocks, he proposed reducing the use of  candles. This was to be achieved by: taxing shuttered windows, putting police  guards on candle shops, banning the use of carriages after sunset and firing  cannons at sunrise. The French in general and Parisians in particular aren't  famous for embracing change suggested by foreigners and none of Franklin's  improving ideas were taken up.
The idea of changing the clocks to  provide longer evening sunshine was put forward by the New Zealander George  Hudson in 1895 but his notion was never implemented. The first person to carry  the idea through to fruition was the London builder William Willett. He wrote  the pamphlet,Waste of Daylight in 1907. Daylight Saving Time was, and  has remained, a controversial contrivance but Willet's proposal was taken up in  England in the First World War and is now used in many countries, especially  those in the Northern Hemisphere.
England sent the word 'fall' and  the idea of Daylight Saving Time to the US and they sent back the phrase 'spring  forward, fall back'. The first example of it that I can find in print  is in an article by Walter Winchell in an October 1957 edition of the  Pennsylvania newspaper The  Derrick, who credits the coining to a rival newspaper:
New Yorkers and other easterners    who enjoy Daylight Savings Time until October’s end are recommended to the Los    Angeles Examiner’s clever and simple four-word memo to put the clock ahead or    back..."Spring forward, Fall back.
Under the thumb
Completely under someone's  control.
Origin
Few fields of endeavour have as  much false etymology associated with them as falconry. ' A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush ' derives from hunting with game birds and this has seemingly led  to a spate of supposed derivations along the same lines. 'Hoodwinked' is said to  derive from putting a cloth cap over the eyes of a falcon to calm the bird by  simulating nighttime and ' old codger ' is said to derive  from the carrier of the cadge or cage that held the birds. Neither of these has  any basis in fact. We can add to the list 'under the thumb', which was recently  presented on the BBC's Alan Titchmarsh Show as originating from the handler's  use of his thumb to trap the bird in his hand when he didn't want it to fly.  Again, that's pure flight of fancy.
Being 'under one's thumb' is just a figurative expression that  alludes to being completely under another's control. The allusion was to a  protagonist so powerful and a victim so insignificant that even the former's  thumb was strong enough to control them. None of the early references relates to  falconry, or to any other specific origin. The phrase was always used to refer  to a powerful person, like a king or lord, exercising control over a subject.  The earliest reference I can find to the expression in print is from the 18th  century English politician Arthur Maynwaring in The Life and Posthumous Works of  Arthur Maynwaring, 1715, which, as is strongly hinted at in the title, was  printed after his death:
The French King having them    under his Thumb, compell'd them to go at his Pace.
The phrase was well enough  established by the 19th century for it to spawn the verb form 'thumbing'. This  was defined in James Halliwell's Dictionary Of Archaic And  Provincial Words, 1847, as:
Thumbing: A Nottingham phrase,    used to describe that species of intimidation practised by masters on their    servants when the latter are compelled to vote as their employers    please.
'Under the thumb' is still used  today with much the same meaning as when it was coined in the 18th century. It's  not entirely clear what meaning Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had in mind when  they wrote the eponymous 'Under My Thumb' in 1966, but it probably  wasn't falconry.
Badger to death
Harass or persecute.
Origin
The phrase 'badger to death'  alludes to the nocturnal burrowing mammal Meles meles, that is, the  badger. At first sight it would seem intuitive that the expression refers to the  fate of badgers in badger-baiting, an erstwhile so-called sport in which badgers  were pitted against dogs and the protagonists tore each other apart. However,  those fights weren't as one-sided as we may now suppose. Badgers were chosen for  this entertainment as they are extremely tenacious when cornered and have the  ability to bite their prey until their teeth meet. This fact has led to the  alternative view that 'badgering to death' originally referred to the fate of  the dogs and meant 'killed by a badger'. We aren't ever likely to know which of  these derivations is correct, although most etymologists favour the former  explanation.
'Badgering' has been used as a verb to denote persecution for some  time. Francis Grose gave a definition of it in the 1785 edition of his  invaluable glossary A  Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:
Badger, to confound, perplex, or    teaze.
The first record that I can find  of 'badgered to death' in print doesn't refer directly to badgers, nor to  fighting dogs, but is a metaphorical reference to theatrical performers. This  reference is found in Charles Dibdin's journal of the dramatic arts The By-stander; or, Universal  Weekly Expositor, 1790, in which he gives the following advice:
It is always worth a manager's    while to engage a performer for three years. The first he is a drudge; the    second he is a servant of all work; the third badgered to death, and at length    dismissed.
Badger baiting was made illegal in  the UK in 1835 and instances of it are now rare, but it still does go on and  prosecutions are occasionally brought. Despite that decline, the phrase has been  given a new lease of life in recent years. Many UK dairy farmers claim that  badgers, which are carriers of Bovine TB, are responsible for spreading the  disease and killing their cattle. Of course, tabloid newspapers usually report  TB outbreaks with the headline 'cows are badgered to death'.
Worse for wear
Shabby or worn through use; drunk.
Origin
The expression 'worse for wear' is something of  a linguistic oddity in that it has endured a variety of different meanings,  versions and spellings during its lifetime. Let's start with the spelling  indignities. 'Worse for wear' or 'worst for wear'? Both of these are found in  print but, of course, the phrase is 'worse for wear', the alternative being a  simple but sadly commonplace muddling of 'worse' and 'worst'. 'Worse for ware'  and 'worse for where' are also sometimes seen, again occasionally using 'worst'  rather than 'worse', and there's little better explanation for them other than  that some people can't spell 'wear'.
Anyone familiar with etymology will have come  across the redoubtable John Heywood's glossary A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in  Effect of all the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue. 'Worse for wear' is one  of the older phrases in the language and Heywood included it in the book's first  edition in 1546:
Al thyng is the wors for the    wearyng.
The meaning there is clear - 'as things are  used they deteriorate'. As it became established in the language 'worse for  wear' developed into a synonym for 'worn out'. At this stage the variant 'none  the worse for wear' was coined, meaning 'used but not worn out' and also  dragging along its misspelled 'worst/ware/where' versions. The English poet  Charles Churchill used that expression, in a rather backhand compliment to his  wife, in the poem The  Ghost, 1794:
Some, in my place, to gain their    ends,
Would give relations up and friends;
Would lend a wife, who, they    might swear
Safely, was none the worse for wear.
Into the 20th century  and the phrase took on another meaning, that is, 'drunk'. This was taken up by  the UK tabloid press in the 1960s and has now superseded 'tired and emotional'  as the euphemism of choice when describing some young wag falling out of a taxi  at 3am.
Slush fund
Money put aside to be used to bribe or  influence, especially in a political context.
Origin
The  word  'slush' was coined in 17th century England as the name for  half-melted snow and  is first referred to in print with that meaning in  Henry Best's Rural Economy in Yorkshire,  1641. Of course, that's where the name Slushies, the part-frozen  flavoured drinks, came from.
A century later, there was an alternative  meaning of 'slush', or  'slosh', which was the fat or grease obtained from meat  boiled on board  ship. That invaluable guide The Gentleman's Magazine,  1756, referred to it like this:
He used much slush (the rancid fat of pork)    among his victuals.
William Thompson made it sound even less  appetising in The Royal  Navy-men's Advocate, 1757:
Tars whose Stomachs are not very squeamish,    can bear to paddle their Fingers in stinking Slush.
Despite it not being the apex of culinary  delight it was considered a  perk for ships' cooks and crew and they sold the fat  that they gathered  from cooking meat whenever they reached port. This perquisite  became  known as a 'slush fund' and the term joins the numerous English phrases   that first saw the light of day at sea.
The author William McNally didn't think much of  the practice and included a description of it in Evils & Abuses in Naval & Merchant Service, 1839:
The sailors in the navy are allowed salt    beef. From this  provision, when cooked nearly all the fat boils off; this is     carefully skimmed and put into empty beef or pork barrels, and sold, and  the    money so received is called the slush fund.
In the same year, The Army and Navy  Chronicle suggested that a  ship's slush fund would be a suitable source of money to buy books for the  crew:
To give men the use of such books as would    best suit their taste,  would be to appropriate what is their own, (viz.) the    slush fund for  the purchase of such works.
This is the beginning of the meaning we now  have for 'slush fund',  i.e. money put aside to make use of when required. The  use of such  savings for improper uses like bribes or the purchase of influence   began in the USA not long afterwards. The Congressional Record for January 1894 printed  this:
[Cleveland] was not elected in 1888 because    of pious John Wanamaker and his $400,000 of campaign slush  funds.
Into  the 20th century and we head straight for one of The Simpsons'  many cultural  references and back to the original meaning of 'slush  fund'. In the 1998  episode Lard of the  Dance, Homer  and Bart instigate a scheme to make money by collecting and  selling  grease. They try to siphon Groundskeeper Willie's stashed vat of rancid   fat from the school kitchen. A fight breaks out over what is clearly  Willie's  slush fund or, in 20th century cartoon parlance, his  'retirement  grease'.
Batten down the hatches
Prepare for trouble.
Origin
In his recent (September  2013) song Tempest, which  recounts the story of the Titanic's sinking, Bob Dylan uses the  lines:
They battened down the hatches
But the    hatches wouldn't hold
This has caused a couple of correspondents to  write to me asking what 'batten down' means. Many people may know what 'batten  down the hatches' means, but some clearly don't, so here goes...
'Hatch' is one of those words with dozens of  meanings in the dictionary. In this case we are looking at the 'opening in the  deck of a ship' meaning. Ships' hatches, more formally called hatchways, were  commonplace on sailing ships and were normally either open or covered with a  wooden grating to allow for ventilation of the lower decks. When bad weather was  imminent, the hatches were covered with tarpaulin and the covering was edged  with wooden strips, known as battens, to prevent it from blowing off. Not  surprisingly, sailors called this 'battening down'.
The misspellings 'battern down the hatches' and  'baton down the hatches' are sometimes found in print. 'Batons' are sticks or  staffs, which makes that particular misspelling plausible. 'Batterns' are a form  of stage lighting.
The earliest  reference to this practice that I know of is in William Falconer's An Universal Dictionary of the  Marine, 1769:
The battens serve to confine the edges of the    tarpaulings close down to the sides of the hatches.
The first citation of the explicit use of the  phrase 'batten down the hatches' is from the 1883 Chambers Journal:
"Batten down the hatches - quick,    men."
Tawdry
Showy, but of poor quality.
Origin
Why should the derivation of a single word like  'tawdry' be listed on a site that specialises in the etymology of phrases? Two  reasons: one, it is short for the phrase 'tawdry lace' (of which more later) and  another, I like the derivation so decided to sneak it in.
For the explanation of  the word tawdry we have to go back to 7th century England and the story of  Etheldrida, the daughter of the king of East Anglia, who was otherwise known as  Saint Audrey. Audrey died in 679 AD of a tumour of the throat. It was recorded  by the Venerable Bede in Ecclesiasticall History, 731  AD, that her fate was considered just retribution as she had "for vain show  adorned her neck with manifold splendid necklaces".
In the 16th century Nicholas Harpsfield, the  Archdeacon of Canterbury, published his own ecclesiastical history Historia Anglicana  Ecclesiastica and commented  that:
"Our women of England are wont to wear about    the neck a certain necklace, formed of thin and fine  silk."
These silks were known as Saint Audrey's  laces.
As time went by, 'St. Audrey's lace' became  shortened to 'taudrey lace'. That comes as little surprise to those of us who  live in Yorkshire, where expressions like 'the other' and 'down the hole' have  long been replaced by 't'other' and 'down t'ole'. In his 1579 poem The Shepheardes Calendar,  Edmund Spenser referred to 'tawdrie lace', in a warning to shepherd's  daughters:
See, that your rudenesse doe not you    disgrace: 
Binde your fillets    faste, 
And gird in your    waste, 
For more finesse with    a tawdrie lace.
'Tawdry' hadn't by that date developed the  'showy/poor quality' meaning that we now use but had started on its route there.  What began as a name for fine lace ribbon became a disparaging term for the poor  quality lace bought by country wenches at rural fairs. When Shakespeare wanted  to establish Mopsa, the country bumpkin girlfriend of the Clown in A Winter's Tale, as less than  sophisticated, he portrayed her as interested in frivolous showy dress and gave  her this line:
Come, you promised me a tawdry-lace and a    pair of sweet gloves.
'Tawdry' has long departed from any association  with saints or expensive necklaces and is now entirely a negative description.  To all the Audrey's out there, sorry but, as they would say around here, you're  just t'Audrey.
Fine words butter no parsnips
Meaning
Nothing is achieved by empty words or  flattery.
Origin
This  proverbial  saying  is  English and dates from the 17th century. It expresses the notion that fine words  count for nothing and that action means more than flattery or promises. You  aren't very likely to come across 'fine words butter no parsnips' as 20th  century street slang - you are more liable to hear it in a period costume  drama.
Potatoes were imported into Britain from  America by John Hawkins in the mid 16th century and became a staple in what  established itself as the national dish - meat and two veg. Before that, various  root vegetables were eaten instead, often mashed and, as anyone who has eaten  mashed swedes, turnips or parsnips can testify, they cry out to be 'buttered-up'  - another term for flattery. Indeed, the English were known for their habit of  layering on butter to all manner of foods, much to the disgust of the French who  used it as evidence of the English lack of expertise regarding cuisine and to  the Japanese, who referred to Europeans in general and the English in particular  as 'butter-stinkers'. This butter habit is evidenced in the various forms of the  expression that are found in print in the 1600s - 'fine/fair/soft words butter  no parsnips/cabbage/fish/connie[rabbit]'. A typical example is this verse from  John Taylor's Epigrammes, 1651:
Words are but wind that do from men    proceed;
None but Chamelions on bare Air can feed;
Great men large    hopeful promises may utter;
But words did never Fish or Parsnips    butter..
The earliest version that I know of in print is  in John Clarke's Latin/English textbookParoemiologia, 1639:
Faire words butter noe parsnips, verba non    alunt familiam. [words, no family support]
That's all, no more fine words from me this  week.
On tenterhooks
In a state of uncomfortable  suspense.
Origin
Tenterhooks aren't  directly connected with tents, nor are they the hooks used by butchers, as the  common misspelling 'tenderhooks' might suggest. A tenter is a wooden frame,  often in the form of a line of fencing, used to hang woollen or linen cloth to  prevent it from shrinking as it dries. The tenterhooks are, not surprisingly,  the hooks on the tenter used to hold the cloth in place.
Tenters are no longer everyday objects but a  hundred years ago, in wool weaving areas like the North of England, they were a  common sight on the land around the many woollen mills, called 'tenter-fields'.  It is easy to see how the figurative expression 'on tenterhooks', with its  meaning of painful tension, derived from the 'tenting' or stretching of fabric.  The expression was originally 'on the tenters'. The English West Country  playright John Ford was the first to record that expression in the play Broken Heart, 1633:
Passion, O, be contained. My very heart    strings Are on the Tenters.
Towards the end of the century the more  accurate 'on the tenterhooks' began to replace the earlier phrase. This first  example that I have found of it in print is in the 1690 edition of a periodical  that was published annually between 1688 and 1693, The General History of  Europe:
The mischief is, they will not meet again    these two years, so that all business must hang upon the tenterhooks till    then.
Get your dander up
Become agitated or angry.
Origin
It is often reported that  'it gets my dandruff up' is one of Samuel Goldwyn's celebrated Goldwynisms. When  it comes to having aphorisms that he didn't coin attributed to him, Goldwyn is  up there in the big league with  Oscar  Wilde and  Yogi Berra . Whether he made that quip is open to  doubt. What is clear is that, like those other supposed Goldwyn coinages -  'statue of limitations' and 'stiff upper chin', the 'dandruff' alternative is  repeated now for its comic effect. Dander is an informal term for the skin that  is shed from the bodies of animals - dandruff in fact. So, perhaps the  Goldwynism may not be all that far from the mark.
If 'get one's dander up' is synonymous with  'get one's dandruff up' we need to explain how dandruff can be 'up' exactly -  not an intuitive picture to visualise. The earlier phrase 'get one's hackles  up', which has the same meaning as 'get one's dander up', may help. Hackles are  the hairs on the back of the neck, especially of foxhounds when excited by an  imminent kill, but is also applied more generally. As dandruff may be attached  to hair, it is possible that 'get one's dander up' derived as a jokey  alternative to the 'hackles' version.
As is often the case with the etymology of old  phrases, there's another possible derivation. 'Dander', also means 'ferment',  that is, the froth created in the fermentation of yeast in brewing or baking.  The word may have been borrowed to form the expression 'get one's dander up' in  order to convey the imagery of a frothing or agitated uproar - similar to the  associated phrase 'get oneself into a stew'.
There's also a speculation that the phrase was  originally 'get one's dandruff up' and that it followed the imagery of a violent  and agitated scuffle in which the participant's dandruff might be expected to  fly into the air. That one is easily dismissed as the 'dandruff' version  post-dates the others. The earliest citation I can find for that version is  in The Wisconsin Tribune,  April 1853:
"Well, gosh-all Jerusalem, what of it?' now    yelled the downeaster, getting his dandruff up."
As we shall see, the 'dander' version is  earlier than that.
So, 'get one's dander up' derives from either  dander meaning hackles or dander meaning ferment. Both are plausible. Dander did  certainly have the meaning of ferment by the time the phrase was coined, as  recorded in Sir John Dalrymple's Observations on his  Yeast-cake, circa 1796:
"The season for working molasses lasts five    months, of which three weeks are lost in making up the dander, that is, the    ferment."
Likewise, the 'hackles' meaning was coined at  around the same date, as is seen in this entry in the 1786 edition of The Sportsman's  Dictionary:
"Some horses have neither scales, dander, or    scabs."
The first reference that I can find to 'dander'  being 'up' (or raised), that is, being used with the meaning of excitement or  annoyance, is from an story in the 1831 edition of The American Comic  Annual, by Henry J. Finn, in  which a character is teased for his small stature:
"A general roar of laughter brought Timmy on    his legs. His dander was raised... straining up to his full  height"
It would be nice to provide a clear assurance  as to the origin of the phrase but, frankly, both meanings of dander have a  reasonable claim and your guess is as good as mine. One thing I can say with  certainty is that Samuel Goldwyn didn't coin 'get my dandruff up'.
Be enthralled
To be captivated; to be held spellbound by  pleasing qualities.
Origin
Who  was the first person to be found enthralling? Strange as it may seem for such a  destructive and belligerent race, it was a Viking. The Vikings were stalwart  ravagers and pillagers but didn't put much effort into housework. They didn't  need to; they had the Thralls.
The Thralls weren't a race as such but a  category of people who were at the absolute bottom of the pile in Scandinavian  society in the Dark Ages. They were captives of war who were held as slaves,  often passing their bondage on to their children. The harshness of the treatment  of the Thralls by the Vikings was uncompromising. Thralls weren't allowed to  speak in the presence of their masters nor to own property. Anyone captured by  the Vikings was said to be 'in thrall' (later enthrall) and was in for a very  bad time indeed.
Things didn't get much better for the Thralls  when Viking dominance faded around 1100 AD. The Catholic Church decreed that  enslavement of Christians was sinful, whereas heathens were fair game. This  brought about an increase in demand for non-Christian slaves and the Thralls,  being mostly Pagans, continued in slavery. The Lindisfarne Gospels, circa 950  AD, makes a mention (in Old English) of a Thrall in the context of 'one whose  liberty is forfeit'.
By the 17th century the literal meaning of  'enthrall' had been forgotten and the word began to be used in the way we use it  now. Shakespeare used it that way in A Midsummer Night's Dream,  1600:
So is mine eye enthralled to thy    shape.
Many Norse words have retained their original  negative meanings in modern English - anger, berserk, Hell, irksome, rotten,  ugly and troll, for example. It is odd that 'enthralled', a word now associated  with pleasure and charm, meant virtually the opposite when it was coined a  thousand years ago.
The Real McCoy
The real thing - not a substitute.
Origin
The Scottish racing cyclist Sir Chris Hoy won the sixth  Olympic gold medal of his career at the London Games on 7th August 2012, making  him the most successful British Olympian and elevating him even higher in the  sporting firmament in the UK than he was before. This is far from the first time  that Hoy has made news here and the red-top newspapers strained themselves to  come up with new headlines - 'Medals Ahoy', 'Hoy Joy', 'Six Machine', 'The Hoy  Wonder', 'Knight Rider', and so on. They couldn't do better than the line on the  banner that his proud parents unfurl each time he wins - 'The Real McHoy'. This  is of course a paraphrase of the expression 'the real McCoy' (or 'real mackay',  'real macoy', 'real mackoy'...), which rivals 'the whole nine yards' and 'the  full Monty' for pre-eminence in the 'I know where that phrase comes from'  stakes. As usual, plausibility and frequent retelling are considered enough for  absolute certainty. With that in mind, please read on...
There are several sources that are suggested as  being the origin of 'the real McCoy', for example:
McCoy is derived from Mackay, referring to    Messrs. Mackay, Edinburgh, who made a brand of fine whisky from 1856 onwards    that they promoted as 'the real MacKay' from 1870. The expression could have    derived from the name of the branch of the MacKay family from Reay, Scotland,    i.e. 'the Reay Mackay'. 
After Kid McCoy (Norman Selby, 1872-1940),    American welterweight boxing champion. The story goes, and there are various    versions of it, that a drunk challenged Selby to prove that he was McCoy and    not one of the many lesser boxers trading under the same name. After being    knocked to the floor the drunk rose to admit that 'Yes, that's the real    McCoy'.
Elijah McCoy, the Canadian inventor educated    in Scotland, made a successful machine for lubricating engines that spawned    many copies, all inferior to the original. He patented the design in    1872.
The feud between the Hatfield and McCoy    families, of West Virginia and Kentucky respectively, in the  1880s.
The list goes on to include several other  versions but none is supported by any evidence and they carry little  credibility. Given that there's no hard evidence, the favourite has to be the  earliest example to be found in print. That's a close call, as many of the  sources date back to the second half of the 19th century. The earliest known  printed citation is from 1856, in the Scottish poem Deil's Hallowe'en:
"A drappie o' [drop of] the real    McKay."
This clearly refers to the McKay (or MacKay)  whisky. The 'real MacKay' expression occurs in Scottish newspapers quite  frequently in the 1860s and must have been in common use in Scotland at that  date. There's no proof (no pun intended) that MacKay's whisky is the source of  this phrase but we can say for sure that Elijah McCoy, Kid McCoy and the  Hatfields and McCoys weren't involved in its coinage as their respective  supposed involvements all come years after the expression was already widely  used in print.
The 'Real McCoy' variant, which is essentially  the same phrase, comes later and the earliest examples that I have found come  from Canada. James S. Bond's novel The Rise and Fall of the Union  Club, 1881, contains this:
By jingo! yes; so it will be. It's the 'real    McCoy,' as Jim Hicks says. Nobody but a devil can find us  there.
A December 1891 edition of the Canadian  newspaper The Winnipeg Free  Press also includes the  expression. Given that Elijah McCoy and the phrase 'the real MacKay' both moved  from Scotland to Canada, it is possible that the adaption from 'real MacKay' to  'real McCoy' was done by him or on his behalf, but the real 'real MacKay', like  the 'real McHoy', is Scottish.
Damp squib
Something that fails ignominiously to satisfy  expectations; an anti-climax, a disappointment.
Origin
The first thing to say about the expression 'damp squib' is that is  is 'squib', not 'squid'. Squid are a species of cephalopod. In their natural  environment squid are usually damp but that's as near to this phrase as they are  likely to get. Having mentioned squid I ought also to get the other notable  squiddish play on words out of the way - the old joke "Hey, where's that sick  squid you owe me?". Having done our linguistic duty with squid, we can now move  on to 'damp squib'.
A squib is a form of firework, usually  cylindrical in shape with a paper fuse at one end, which provides a mild  explosion - think 'dynamite lite'. Clearly, fireworks work best when they are  dry. Anyone who, at a backyard bonfire, has lit the blue touch paper and retired  only to see the firework phut and fizzle out will know the disappointment of a  damp squib.
In the 16th century, 'squibs' were also short,  sharp literary compositions of a satirical or sarcastic character. Both the  'firework' meaning and the 'satire' meaning are first found in print in the  1520s and it isn't entirely clear which came first.
The first use that I can find of the expression being used  figuratively certainly derives from the 'firework' meaning. That is in the  London newspaper The Morning  Post, March 1837, in a  complimentary article about the British parliamentarian George Grote:
Mr. Grote is a nice man. We rather like Mr.    Grote. Mr. Grote does not vote black white; or fiz and splutter, after the    fashion of a damp squib.
'Squib' isn't a word that we find ourselves  using very often, hence the erroneous 'damp squid' isn't difficult to find in  print, for example, this piece from the Trinidad & Tobago Express,  June 2005:
I imagine the excitement will last for    another few weeks before it peters out into a damp  squid...
Young turk
A young person, full of new ideas and impatient  for change.
Origin
The figurative expression 'young turks' meaning  'the new breed, impatient for change' began to be used in the early 20th  century.
William Safire, in The new language of politics: an  anecdotal dictionary of catchwords, slogans, and political usage, 1968, referred to a group of US  politicians who, in 1929, were called the 'Young Turks':
These new Republican warriors were called the    Young Turks, a band of about 20 who had mutinied against the feeble leadership    of the Old Guard. For Senators they were young men (average age:    56).
Safire also included a quotation, which states  that Winston Churchill used the phrase during the Bermuda Conference of 1953.  Churchill digressed from the agenda to discuss imperialism with Dwight  Eisenhower, expressing his doubts about the wisdom of self-government for  peoples not yet ready for it. When the American President disagreed with a  portion of the Prime Minister's argument, Churchill smiled and  said: 
"You're just like the Young Turks in my    government."
Neither the US Senate of 1929 nor the British  government of 1953 contained anyone of Turkish nationality, so where did the  expression come from? It could hardly be simpler. Unusually for a figurative  expression the meaning is literal; the first 'young turks' were exactly that -  young Turks.
Selim III was Sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1789 to  1807. He made the first major attempts to modernize the army along European  lines and to rejuvenate the Turkish empire. These reforms were supported by a  band of youthful followers who favoured modernisation but opposed by the more  conservative older generation. There are many newspaper reports from around that  time that refer to the modernists as 'young Turks' in a purely literal sense,  that is, they were young and they were Turkish. For example, this piece from  The Salisbury and Winchester  Journal, January 1828:
The young Turks, of all classes, are    exercising themselves in the use of arms in the European manner. The    enthusiasm for the Sultan has risen to the highest  pitch.
This dispute rumbled on for over a century and  eventually a Turkish nationalist party that supported the reformation of the  absolute monarchy of the Ottoman Empire was formed and started the Turkish  revolution of 1908. It was led by The Three Pashas - Mehmed Talaat (aged 34 in 1908),  Ismail Enver (27) and Ahmed Djemal (36), who were widely known as the 'Young  Turks'. Soon after that and, as we have seen above, as early as 1929, any group  of people passionate for change became known as 'young turks'.
Old chestnut
Meaning
A story that has been told repeatedly before, a  'venerable' joke. Hence, in extended use, anything trite, stale, or too often  repeated.
Origin
The phrase 'old chestnut' has only an indirect association with  chestnut trees or with their fruit. The derivation of the expression turns out  to be a contender for old chestnut status itself. The story goes like this: in  1816, a melodrama called Broken Sword, by the playwright and theatrical  manager William Dimond, was performed at the Royal Covent Garden Theatre,  London. The play contained this exchange:
Zavior: I entered the wood at Collares, when    suddenly from the thick boughs of a cork tree...
Pablo: (Jumping up.) A    chesnut, Captain, a chesnut... Captain, this is the twenty-seventh time I have    heard you relate this story, and you invariably said, a chesnut, till    now.
Despite a drubbing from the critics, the play  was a success and later transferred to theatres in the USA. So far, so  factual.
Here's where we move from fact to plausibility.  In the 1880s, many American newspapers began using 'chestnut' in the way we do  now, to refer to hoary, oft-repeated stories, and the term became established in  the common lingo thereafter. The 'old' was added later as an  intensifier.
In April 1896, the Ohio newspaper The Daily Herald took it unto itself to explain the  phrase's origin. It published a story about the actor who had played Pablo in  early productions of Broken Sword:
William Warren, who had often played the part    of Pablo, was at a 'stag' dinner when one of the gentlemen present told a    story of doubtful age and originality. 'A chestnut,' murmured Mr. Warren,    quoting from the play. 'I have heard you tell the tale these 27 times.' The    application of the line pleased the rest of the table, and when the party    broke up each helped to spread the story and Mr. Warren’s    commentary.
The play itself, although popular in its time,  was 80 years old by 1896 and Warren was long dead, so the Daily Herald story was  (at best) based on Chinese whispers or (at worst) pure invention. However, even  if that stag dinner wasn't the first use of the 'chesnut' expression and Warren  didn't originate it, someone else could easily have used the same source. The  gist of the tale, that 'old chestnut' derives from the play Broken Sword, hovers  somewhere between plausibility and fact and many choose to believe  it.
A bigger bang for your buck
Meaning
More for your money.
Origin
Generals and political leaders have argued over  the costs of the military since Adam was a lad. Their conversations have  probably not changed much:
General: "Caesar/My Liege/Mr President, we    need more triremes/cannons/nuclear weapons."
Emperor/King/President: "The    people need more olives/bread/iPads. Can't you manage with what you've    got?"
Dwight D. Eisenhower faced something of a  dilemma in 1953. He was a military man to his socks and was inclined to augment defense in the face of the perceived 'reds under the bed' threat, but he was  also a Republican US president and, as such, politically wedded to cutting state  spending. His solution was simple - increase the armed forces but decrease their  budget. In ordinary circumstances that circle would be difficult to square. The  solution that the US Joint Chiefs of Staff came up with, which they titled the  'New Look', was a policy of using nuclear weapons in any conflict bigger than  what they called 'a brush-fire war'. That allowed them to radically reduce the  numbers of servicemen and replace them with the comparatively inexpensive atomic  bombs.
All of the above was described in a story in The Winona Republican  Herald on 21st December 1953.  The story also reports Admiral Arthur Radford as describing the policy as the  'bigger bang for your buck' theory. This was an adaptation of Pepsi-Cola's 'More  Bounce to the Ounce' slogan, which was introduced in 1950.
Most sources credit US Defense Secretary  Charles Wilson as the source of the expression 'a bigger bang for your buck'.  These invariably point to him having used the phrase in 1954. Wilson could be  the person who coined the phrase but 1954 is clearly too late and, until a  pre-December 1953 source is found, the phrase has to be logged as 'coined by  Anonymous'.
The current form of the phrase, in which the  'bang' has become plural now that it has lost its nuclear connotations, is 'more  bangs for your buck'.
On the fiddle
Engaged in a fraud.
Origin
'Fiddling' is usually meant to mean 'cheating  in a petty way', perhaps falsifying one's expenses or not declaring all of one's  taxable income. Of course, a fiddle is also a slang term for violin.
There are a couple of proposed derivations of  the 'cheating' meaning of the phrase 'on the fiddle', each of them having  supporters who are firm in their belief. Let's take the oldest first. The  expression is said by some to derive from the Emperor Nero, who famously  ' fiddled while Rome burned ' and was a byword for  corruption and dishonesty. The second suggestion is that the 'fiddle' was the  name of the raised edge of the square wooden plates used by sailors. If a sailor  took a normal amount of food he was said to have a ' square  meal ' and if his plate was overflowing he was said to be  'on the fiddle'.
As  is often the case, I only set up those suggestions in order to knock them down.  The Nero story is mere fancy. It may be a nice play on words that he was 'on the  fiddle' in both senses, that is, he was both corrupt and a violinist (actually  he wasn't even a violinist, there being no such instrument in Nero's lifetime,  but let's not get sidetracked) but that's all this tale has going for  it.
The culinary procedures on board sailing ships  don't offer much of an explanation either. The idea that sailors' plates had  raised edges and that these were called fiddles is quite incorrect. There were  fiddles in sailing ships' galleys but those were arrangements of small posts and  strings arranged around the edges of tables that were used to stop plates  falling on the floor in rough weather.
If the above isn't enough to convince then the  fact that 'on the fiddle' in the 'acting fraudulently' meaning is a mid-20th  century idiom should clinch it. The expression wasn't known in the age of sail  and certainly not in ancient Rome. A good place to look for a phrase like 'on  the fiddle', with its association with minor crime, would be court records, and  if the expression were in common use in English it might be expected to be found  in the database of cases provided by the Central Criminal Court in England and  Wales, commonly known as the Old Bailey. This is a comprehensive record of all  the criminal cases brought to the court between 1674 and 1913, and no one was  accused in The Bailey of being 'on the fiddle' during all that time.
The term 'fiddle' appears to have originated in  America. It is recorded in an 1874 edition of John Hotten's Slang Dictionary:
Fiddle... In America, a swindle or an    imposture.
Hotten also included this entry:
Fiddler... A sharper, a cheat; also one who    dawdles over little matters, and neglects great ones.
'On the fiddle' was taken up by the British forces in WWII.  It was well enough established in popular slang in the UK by 1961 for it to have  been used as the title of a Sean Connery film and that is the first example of  it that I've found in print. The plot involved a young Connery playing a  streetwise  rough diamond  who runs various street scams while  serving in the British army.
Halcyon days
Calm, peaceful days.
Origin
The Halcyon is a bird of Greek legend and the name is now  commonly given to the European Kingfisher. The ancients believed that the bird  made a floating nest in the Aegean Sea and had the power to calm the waves while  brooding her eggs. Fourteen days of calm weather were to be expected when the  Halcyon was nesting - around the winter solstice, usually 21st or 22nd of  December. The Halcyon days are generally regarded as beginning on the 14th or  15th of December.
The source of the belief in the bird's power to  calm the sea originated in a myth recorded by Ovid. The story goes that Aeolus,  the ruler of the winds, had a daughter named Alcyone, who was married to Ceyx,  the king of Thessaly. Ceyx was drowned at sea and Alcyone threw herself into the  waves in a fit of grief. Instead of drowning, she was transformed into a bird  and carried to her husband by the wind.
The myth came to the English-speaking world in  the 14th century, when, in 1398, John Trevisa translated Bartholomew de  Glanville's De proprietatibus  rerum into Middle  English:
"In the cliffe of a ponde of occean, Alcion,    a see foule, in wynter maketh her neste and layeth egges in vii days and    sittyth on brood ... seuen dayes."
By the 16th century the phrase 'halcyon days'  had lost its association with the nesting time of the bird and had taken on the  figurative meaning of 'calm days'. Shakespeare used the expression that way  in Henry VI, Part I,  1592:
Assign'd am I to be the English    scourge.
This night the siege assuredly I'll raise:
Expect Saint    Martin's summer, halcyon days,
Since I have entered into these    wars.
Note: Saint Martin's summer is what we now  know as an  Indian  summer .
The kingfisher is associated with other powers  relating to the weather. In mediaeval times it was thought that if the dried  carcass of a kingfisher was hung up it would always point its beak in the  direction of the wind [don't try this at home]. Shakespeare also refers  to this belief, in King  Lear, 1605:
Bring oil to fire, snow to their colder    moods;
Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks
With every gale and    vary of their masters
Our current use of 'halcyon days' tends to be  nostalgic and recalling of the seemingly endless sunny days of youth - despite  the fact that the original halcyon days were in the depths of winter.
Fob off
Meaning
To put off deceitfully; to attempt to satisfy  with something of inferior quality or something less than one has been led to  expect.
Origin
In 1980, Margaret Thatcher's government  introduced the Community Charge in Britain. This highly unpopular tax, which was  known colloquially as the Poll Tax, was firmly rejected by the British populace  and initiated Thatcher's political demise. Step back 600 years to England's  first Peasants' Revolt, also instigated by a clumsy attempt to install a Poll  Tax by an unpopular government - the advisers of the 14-year-old King Richard  II.
On a pleasant May morning in 1381, the king's tax collector John  Brampton rode into the Essex village of Fobbing to collect the poll tax of 3  groats from each of the local villagers. The villagers gathered together,  Brampton was sent packing and the Peasants' Revolt had begun. Ask anyone in the  village today and they will tell you that Brampton wasn't just turned away, he  was 'fobbed off' - "...and that's how the expression 'fobbed off'  originated".
As is often the case with phrases that a local  tourist office would like to appropriate for their neighbourhood (like  ' Paint the town red ' and ' Cock and bull story ' for example), the link  between the language and the place is spurious. Nice village it may be and the  peasants there may be revolting, but 'fobbing off' has nothing to do with  Fobbing.
'Fob' is known in English as a verb meaning 'to  delude or impose upon' only since the 16th century - 200 years after Brampton  was given the bum's rush out of Fobbing. The word is probably an import from  Germany, where the earlier term 'foppen' has the same meaning.
The English playwright Robert Greene used the  term in the romantic prose poem Mamillia, a mirrour or looking  glasse for the ladies of England, 1583:
I will not... fobbe you with fayre wordes,    and foule deedes.
Greene is best known as a contributor to the  pamphlet A Groats-Worth of  Wit, which is widely interpreted as an attack on Shakespeare. Nevertheless,  Shakespeare was happy to pick up 'fobbed' (as 'fubd' in his original manuscript)  and used it in a speech by Mistress Quickly in Henry IV Part II:
I have borne, and borne, and borne, and have    been fubbed off, and fubbed off, and fubbed off, from this day to that day,    that it is a shame to be thought on.
So, if you want phrase derivations we are here  for you, don't be fobbed off with tour guide stories.
Plain sailing
Smooth and easy progress.
Origin
'Plain sailing', along with the variants  'smooth sailing' and 'clear sailing', which are more common in the USA than  elsewhere, is a nautical phrase that has the literal meaning of 'sailing that is  easy and uncomplicated'. All of these variants of the expression are now used  figuratively to describe any straightforward and trouble-free activity. There  might seem to be be little more to say about 'plain sailing', if it weren't for  the existence of the phrase 'plane sailing'.
'Plane sailing' is a simplified form of navigation, in  which the surface of the sea is considered to be flat rather than curved, that  is, on what mathematicians call a 'plane surface'. The plane method of  approximation made the calculations of distance much easier than those of  'Mercator's sailing', in which the curvature of the earth was taken into  account.
These days we are pretty unequivocal in our  spelling - 'plain' means 'ordinary and uncomplicated' and 'plane' means 'flat'.  The vagaries of spelling in the 17th century made no such distinction and  'plain' and 'plane' were used interchangeably. It is the 'plain' spelling that  is found first in print, in Adam Martindale's A Collection of Letters for  Improvement of Husbandry & Trade, 1683:
A token for ship boys, plain-sailing made    more plain and short than usually, in three particular  methods.
The first known use of the 'plane sailing'  spelling isn't found until much later, in James Atkinson's Epitome of the Art of  Navigation, 1749:
Plane Trigonometry applied in Problems of    Sailing by the Plane Sea-Chart, commonly called  Plane-Sailing.
The spelling is variable but there can be no  doubt that whoever coined 'plain sailing' meant 'navigating the sea as though it  were completely flat', that is, what we now call 'plane sailing'.
In recent years the introduction of the phrase 'clear  sailing' as an alternative to 'plain sailing' may have cleared things up a  little. This was used to good, if rather poignant, comic effect in The Simpsons'  cartoon The Simpsons Bible  Stories, 1999:
Milhouse: Well, Lisa, we're out of Egypt. So,    what's next for the Israelites? Land of milk and honey?
Lisa: [consulting a    scroll] Hmm, well, actually it looks like we're in for forty years of    wandering the desert.
Milhouse: Forty years! But after that, it's clear    sailing for the Jews, right?
Lisa: [nervously] Uh-huh-hum, more or    less.
A frog in the throat
Meaning
Temporary hoarseness caused by phlegm in the  back of the throat.
Origin
'A frog in the throat' is an American phrase  that entered the language towards the end of the 19th century. The expression  doesn't have a fanciful derivation (see more on that below) but comes directly  from the fact that a hoarse person sounds croaky - like a frog.
The earliest reference I can find to the  expression is from How to be  Man, which was an improving 'book for boys', written by the American  clergyman Harvey Newcomb in 1847. Newcomb encouraged the youngsters to resist  the temptation of 'improper diversions' [the nature of which I will leave to  your imagination]:
Now let me beg of you to learn to say NO. If    you find a 'frog in your throat,' which obstructs your utterance, go by    yourself, and practise saying no, no, NO!
The expression must have been in popular use in the USA by 1894, when  it was used in an advertisement as the name of a proprietary medicine for sore  throats, inThe Stevens Point Journal, November 1894:
"The Taylor Bros. say that 'Frog in the    Throat' will cure hoarseness. 10 cents and box."
Interestingly, a reference to the phrase was  printed just four weeks later in the English newspaper The Hastings and St Leonards  Observer, in an article about 'Yankee advertising'. The Observer journalist  describes how a local chemist had adopted an American advertising window display  in order to sell the imported 'Frog in Your Throat' lozenges. The display  consisted of artificial frogs dressed up as English peasants and arranged in a  variety of tableaux entitled 'Merrie England in Ye Olden Time'. In order to lend  some zest to the sales campaign, the advertising agents for the importers  invented a back story which claimed that 'a frog in the throat' was 'an old  English expression, once in common use, but now forgotten here'. That story is  as fake as the stuffed frogs - the expression is certainly American and only  became widely used in England when Taylor Bros. began selling their  lozenges.
That 'old English' story, which is often  elaborated with the explanatory text 'in medieval times physicians thought  that the secretions of a frog could help heal a sore throat', is one of the  pieces of folk etymology that appear to float around the Internet and enjoy  apparent immortality, despite having no basis in truth and no supporting  evidence. As a general rule, any explanation of the origin of a phrase that  begins with 'In medieval times...' should be treated with suspicion.
A tissue of lies
A story invented in order to  deceive.
Origin
If you use a search engine to search for 'tissues' you will  find many pictures of paper handkerchiefs and of human skin - that's what  'tissue' means to us these days. So, whence the phrase 'a tissue of lies'? It  might be thought that the meaning derives from the filmy nature of tissue and  that this had been taken up as a metaphor for lies that were easy to see through  and would readily break down on examination. That's not an unreasonable  assumption but is in fact completely wide of the mark.
For the correct meaning of 'tissue of lies' we  have to go back to the 14th century meaning of 'tissue', that is, 'an  intricately woven ornamental cloth'. That meaning is first recorded in the  Middle English allegorical poem The Romaunt of the Rose, circa  1366:
The barres [decorative straps] were    of gold ful fyne, Upon a tyssu of satyne.
The defining characteristic of tissues was the  complexity of their weaving. A 'tissue of lies' is a complex, interwoven series  of lies, not a flimsy and unconvincing one.
The figurative meaning of the intermingling of  characteristics, usually of a bad kind, began to be used in the 18th century.  From then onward, any combination of 'a network/web/fabric/tissue of  absurdity/error/falsehood' can be found somewhere in literature. Of these, only  'tissue of lies' has withstood the test of time. The phrase began to be used in  the early 19th century, as in this example from the London journal, The Monthly Review, January  1800:
The ingenuity and cunning of politicians are    not infrequently employed to conceal or misinterpret facts; and venal writers    are easily found, ready to construct a tissue of lies to serve the purposes of    their employers.
By the way, there's no truth that the word  'atishoo' derives from the handkerchief meaning of 'tissue' - that's just  atishoo of lies.
Strait-laced
Excessively rigid in matters of conduct; narrow  or over-precise in one's behaviour or moral judgement.
Origin
'Strait', which is often confused with its  homonym 'straight', is a word that is rarely used alone but has stayed with us  in expressions like ' strait and narrow ', 'dire straits',  'strait-jacket' and 'straitened circumstances'. The meaning of those phrases  becomes clear when we know that 'strait' means, not 'free from curvature', but  'tight'. That usage goes back to the 13th century and an early example of the  'tight' meaning is found in John Trevisa's translation of Bartholomew de  Glanville's De Proprietatibus  Rerum, 1398:
A rynge that is streyghte on a fyngre and may    not be take of afore mete, maye easely be take of after mete.
[De    Glanville was clearly a messy eater.]
The confusion between 'straight' and 'strait'  is understandable as some of the phrases above, for example 'strait and narrow',  seem to make sense with the 'straight' meaning. It may be a help with spelling  to remember the 'tight' meaning and that, for example, 'strait-jackets' aren't  straight jackets, they are tight jackets. The 'straight/strait' spelling muddle  has also affected the understanding of 'strait-laced'. It might have been  thought (and I have to admit that I used to think this) that the adjective  referred to the straightness of the tautly stretched lacing of women's dresses.  The phrase does indeed derive from the lacing of dresses and corsets but as a  result of the clothing being tight, not because the lacing was  straight.
Geoffrey Chaucer made a reference to 'streyte'  clothing in The Canterbury  Tales Prologue, circa 1405:
Hir hosen weeren of fyn Scarlet reed Ful    streyte yteyd.
[She was wearing fine, close gartered scarlet    hose.]
The expression 'strait-laced' is found first in  print, also in a Middle English text - John Lydgate's My Fayr Lady, circa 1430. In the poem, for comic  effect, Lydgate describes his beloved variously as 'lyke as an olivaunt  [elephant] and with 'greet square shulderys brood' [great broad, square  shoulders]. Whether his 'fayr lady' enjoyed the joke isn't made  clear:
Hire crowpe doth the semys shrede, Whan they    so streyght lasyd been.
[Her buttocks rip the seams of her clothes, which    previously had been strait-laced.]
In the 16th century, 'strait-laced' began to be  use figuratively to refer to people who were rigid in their beliefs and  thinking. Thomas Martin's religious tract The Marriage of Priestes,  1554, displays that usage:
He had to doe with certaine holy and straite    lased heretikes, whiche denied it to be lawful for a Christian man after his    baptisme to retourne to his wife.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, fashion dictated that women  of quality wore exceptionally tightly laced corsets to emphasize their hourglass  figures. The impression that we now have of ladies of the prim and formal  Victorian upper classes is that they were strait-laced in more ways than  one.
A square meal
A substantial, nourishing meal.
Origin
It is frequently repeated, by tour guides and  the like, that the expression 'a square meal' originated from the Royal Navy  practice of serving meals on square wooden plates. Such plates did exist so that  is a plausible story, but there's no other evidence to support it. In fact, the  lateness of the first printed record (see below) pretty well rules this out as a  credible theory. The Royal Navy's records and many thousands of ship's logs are  still available and, if the phrase came from that source, it would surely have  been recorded before the mid-19th century.
This 'square plate' theory is one of the  best-known examples of folk-etymology. The phrase exists, the square plates  exist, and two and two make five. To be more precise, what we have here is a  back-formation. Someone hears the phrase 'square meal' and then invents a  plausible story to fit it.
The word square has many meanings, including  'proper, honest, straightforward', and that's the meaning in 'square meal'. This  isn't a rectilinear meal on right-angled crockery, but a good and satisfying  meal.
The phrase is of US origin. All the early  citations are from America, including this, the earliest print reference I have  found - an advertisement for the Hope and Neptune restaurant, in the California  newspaper The Mountain  Democrat, November 1856:
"We can promise all who patronize us that    they can always get a hearty welcome and 'square meal' at the 'Hope and    Neptune. Oyster, chicken and game suppers prepared at short  notice."
William Brohaugh, in the usually reliable  'English Through the Ages', dates the saying as having entered the  language in 1840, although no supporting evidence is provided. There certainly  was a spate of coinages of 'food words' in the USA around that date. The terms  below all originated in the 1830s and 40s:
Chili con carne
Tutti-frutti
Seafood
The use of 'square' to mean honest and  straightforward goes back to at least the 16th century; for example, in 1591, in  Robert Greene's Defence of  Conny Catching:
"For feare of trouble I was fain to try my    good hap at square play."
Soon after that, Shakespeare used it in Anthony and Cleopatra,  1606:
"She's a most triumphant Lady, if report be    square to her."
Other phrases use the word with that same  meaning, for example, ' fair  and square ', 'square play', square deal' etc. but these  haven't had spurious derivations invented for them. Coincidentally, another  phrase - the opposite of 'fair and square' - also has a false derivation  relating to plates in the Royal Navy. The story goes like this. The square  wooden plates that sailors received their food on had raised edges called  'fiddles'. If they took too much they were 'on the fiddle'. Perhaps 'story' is  being too kind; invention might be more accurate. The evidence for the  prosecution is:
- There is no record of the edges of sailors'    plates having any name, let alone a fiddle. No dictionary I can find lists    that meaning. 
- Despite    searching high and low, I've not been able to find any citation of the phrase    'on the fiddle' from before the 20th century, apart from those that clearly    mean 'playing the violin'. There are several old 'fiddle' phrases - 'fiddle    faddle', ' fiddling while Rome burns ', 'second fiddle'    etc., but no 'on the fiddle'.
In support of the story there is - well,  nothing. It's never possible to prove a negative so, if you hear that derivation  from a tour guide and ask for evidence they might just provide it. Don't bet the mortgage  on it though; you're more likely to spot Elvis playing tiddlywinks with Lord  Lucan.
Start from scratch
Begin (again) from the beginning, embark on  something without any preparation or advantage.
Origin
As well as the common meaning of the word  'scratch', that is, 'a slight tearing or incision of the skin', there is another  meaning which is used in a string of phrases that include the word. These  expressions include 'come up to scratch', 'scratch golfer', 'toe the scratch' (a  variant of toe the line), 'make from scratch' and 'start from scratch'. What all  of these have in common is the notion of 'scratch' being the beginning - a point  at which there is no advantage or disadvantage. This meaning originated in the  sporting world, where 'scratch' has been used since the 18th century to describe  a starting line that was scratched on the ground.
Boxing, golf, cricket and also any sport that involves some form of  race use lines on the ground as part of their regulations and historians of each  sport encourage the belief that their 'scratch' was the first. Cricket has the  strongest claim. Everyone who ever played cricket as a child will be familiar  with the batting and bowling 'creases' and will have scratched them on the  ground to mark out the pitch. The first time that such a 'scratch' is referred  to in print is in a cricketing manual - John Nyren's Young Cricketer's Tutor, 1833,  which records this line from a 1778 work by Cotton:
"Ye strikers... Stand firm to your scratch,    let your bat be upright."
The positions of boxers who faced each other at  the beginning of a bout used to be marked by a scratched line and boxing has the  best claim to have been the source of 'toe the scratch' (toe the  line).
The expression 'start from scratch' came about  in 'handicap' races where weaker entrants were given a head start. Other sports,  notably golf, have taken up the figurative use of 'scratch' to mean 'with no  advantage - starting from nothing'. The first person who is recorded as  'starting from scratch' was participating in 'pedestrianism' - what we would now  call running. The British sporting newspaper The Erareported on a handicap  running event in Sheffield in December 1853:
The match on the Hyde Park Ground,    Sheffield... has already created quite a furore of excitement among the    sporting men of the North. The manner in which the men have been handicapped    [is]: James Pudney (of Mile-end) and James Sherdon (of Sheffield), start from    scratch; John Syddall, six yards; Richard Conway, twelve; John Saville,    twenty...
I do hope that Hyde Park was in fact the first  place where the expression 'start from scratch' was first written down, as it is  just a mile or so from where I sit and write this stuff.
All that glitters is not gold
Meaning
Not everything that is shiny and superficially attractive is  valuable.
Origin
In the week of Shakespeare's birthday, it seems appropriate  to include a well-known phrase that is associated with the Bard.
  The original form of this phrase was 'all that glisters is  not gold'. The 'glitters' version long ago superseded the original and is now  almost universally used.  Shakespeare is the best-known writer to have expressed the  idea that shiny things aren't necessarily precious things. The original editions  of The Merchant of  Venice, 1596, have the line as 'all that glisters is not gold'.  'Glister' is usually replaced by 'glitter' in modern renditions of the play:
O hell! what have we here?
A carrion Death, within    whose empty eye
There is a written scroll! I'll read the writing.
All    that glitters is not gold...
Various different ways of expressing the idea that 'all that  glitters/glisters is not gold' were in general circulation well before  Shakespeare's day and it was a common enough notion to have been called  proverbial by the 16th century. The 12th century French theologian Alain de  Lille wrote "Do not hold everything gold that shines like gold". Geoffrey  Chaucer also expressed the same idea in Middle English in the poem The House of Fame, 1380 - "Hit  is not al gold, that glareth". Nevertheless, it is Shakespeare who gave us the  version we now use.
The 'glitters' version of this phrase is so long established  as to be perfectly acceptable - especially as 'glisters' and 'glitters' mean the  same thing. Only the most pedantic insist that 'all that glisters is not gold'  is correct and that 'all that glitters is not gold', being a misquotation,  however cobweb-laden, should be shunned. John Dryden was quite happy to use  'glitters' as long ago as 1687, in his poem The Hind and the Panther:
For you may palm upon us new for old:
All, as they say,    that glitters, is not gold.
Revenge is a dish best served cold
Meaning
Vengeance is more satisfying when exacted in  cold blood.
Origin
This proverbial saying certainly gets about a  bit - in time and space. It sounds as though it ought to be old, from  Shakespeare or the like. Vengeance was a frequent theme of Tudor drama and  several authors wrote about it. Francis Bacon coined at least three 'revenge'  proverbs:
- Revenge is a kind of wild justice.
- A    man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.
- Revenge triumphs    over death
Nevertheless, the phrase isn't Tudor. A quick  search of the World Wide Web will yield confidently expressed views that  'revenge is a dish best served cold' is a translation of the line "La vengeance  est un plat qui se mange froide" from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's epistolary  novel Les Liaisons  Dangereuses, 1782. As that text doesn't appear in the novel, or any other  work by de Laclos, the story appears to be a piece of impressively industrious  folk etymology - not only a made up source, but made up in French.
The first example that I can find of the phrase  is in the French author Eugène Sue's novel Memoirs of Matilda, which was  translated into English by D. G. Osbourne and published in 1846:
And then revenge is very good eaten    cold, as the vulgar say.
The italics are from the text, which implies  that the phrase was already in use when the novel was written. As always with  translations, it is a moot point as to who can claim authorship of the proverb  as an English phrase - the translator, who was the first to use the expression  in English, or the original author.
Wherever it can be said to have originated, the  proverb struck a chord in the English-speaking world. More recently, it has been  called into use in three screen classics:
Kind Hearts and Coronets, 1949:    "Revenge is a dish which people of taste prefer to eat cold." 
The Godfather, 1969: Don    Corleone nodded. "Revenge is a dish that tastes best when it is cold," he    said.
Star Trek II, The Wrath of Kahn, 1982: Kirk, old friend, do    you know the Klingon proverb, "Revenge is a dish best served  cold"?
As I said, the proverb gets about - Paris,  Ealing, New York and finally, the Klingon Empire.
Keep it under your hat
Meaning
Keep it secret.
Origin
On first hearing this seems a rather strange  phrase. Why should people put anything under their hats and, even if they were  to, why would that be associated with secrecy? The speculation is that putting  an item under one's hat would be a way of hiding it. Such trickery is recorded,  as in the collection of stories published as The Adventurer, 1793:
"By a sudden stroke of conjuration, a great    quantity of gold might be conveyed under his hat."
The most commonly repeated speculation of the origin of this  expression is that English archers in mediaeval times used to store spare  bowstrings under their hats to keep them dry. That's as likely as another  fanciful story about English bowmen - that the French chopped off the fingers of  any English archers captured during the Hundred Years' War and that the English  archers made defiant two-fingered V-signs to the French army at Agincourt to  show that they still had their fingers and were ready to fire. Later wits have  elaborated on the yarn to include the story that the archers also shouted 'pluck  yew' (English longbows are made of yew wood) - a neat pun but complete  nonsense.
Let's just get that bowstring under the hat  tale out of the way:
- Firstly, keeping dry isn't keeping secret,    so even if archers did store strings under their hats, and there's no evidence    that they did, where is the connection to the phrase's meaning? 
- Secondly, and it would have    been kinder to put this first as it entirely dismisses the archer tale, the    phrase isn't known in English until the 19th century - so much for a mediaeval    origin.
What else, apart from gold and string, might  one keep under one's hat? One's head, of course. The phrase didn't derive from  putting anything under one's hat at all - 'under your hat' simply meant 'in your  head'. That's the meaning alluded to in early citations of the phrase in print.  The oldest of such that I can find is in the novel The History of Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray,  1848:
Thus, oh friendly readers, we see how every man in the world has his own private griefs and business... You and your wife    have pressed the same pillow for forty years and fancy yourselves united.    Psha, does she cry out when you have the gout, or do you lie awake when she    has the toothache? ... Ah, sir - a distinct universe walks about under your    hat and under mine.
The extended phrase 'keep it under your hat',  which didn't arise until the 20th century, simply meant 'keep it in your head',  that is, 'think it, but don't say it'. An early example is found in P. G.  Wodehouse's Inimitable Jeeves, 1923:
It made such a hit with her when she found    that I loved her for herself alone, despite her humble station, that she kept    it under her hat. She meant to spring it on me later.
Back to square one
Back to the beginning, to start  again.
Origin
'Back to square one' is a classic of folk  etymology. Although the origin is uncertain, no uncertainty lurks in the minds  of those who are sure they know how, where and when it was derived. It ranks up  there with ' the whole nine yards ' and  'posh'  as an expression that people 'know' the  origin of, when in fact they don't.
There are three widely reported suggestions as  to the phrase's origin: BBC sports commentaries, board games like Snakes and  Ladders and playground games like hopscotch. Let's examine them in  turn:
BBC Commentaries:
Ask a group of people about the origin of    'back to square one' and it won't be long before you are told that it    originated with BBC football commentaries.
Early BBC radio commentaries did try and help    listeners follow the progress of football and rugby games by notionally    dividing the pitch into eight rectangles. Commentators described the play by    saying which 'square' the ball was in. The Radio Times, the BBC's    listings guide, referred to the practice in an issue from January    1927.
Commentaries that used a numbering system certainly    happened and prints of the pitch diagrams still exist. Recordings of early    commentaries also exist, including the very first broadcast sports commentary    of any kind - a rugby match, as it happens. That commentary, and many others    that followed, referred listeners to the printed maps and a second commentator    called out the numbers as the ball moved from square to square. However, at no    point in any existing commentary do they use the phrase 'back to square    one'.
Despite this, the BBC issued a piece in a    January 2007 edition of The Radio Times that celebrated 80 years of BBC    football commentary. In this, the football commentator John Murray stated with    confidence that "Radio Times' grids gave us the phrase 'back to square one'"    and that "the grid system was dropped in the 1930s (not before the phrase    'back to square one' had entered everyday vocabulary)". This confidence is    despite the fact that, although it could be true, it is nothing but    conjecture.
What counts against the radio commentaries    being the source is:
- The 'squares' are in fact      rectangles.
- Square One isn't in any sense the      beginning in a football game. All of the other seven squares - sorry,      rectangles - have just as good a claim to be starting points.
- Perhaps the most damning evidence is that      the phrase isn't known before 1952. That's many years after the BBC      abandoned the use of visual aids for radio sports    commentaries.
Board Games:
Other sources report that the phrase refers to Snakes and    Ladders or similar board games. The earliest citation of the phrase in print    is currently 1952, from theEconomic Journal:
"He has the problem of maintaining the      interest of the reader who is always being sent back to square one in a sort      of intellectual game of snakes and ladders."
Despite that comment, it isn't a feature of    Snakes and Ladders that players are sent back to square one. Of the many    examples of such boards that exist, only a few have a snake in the first    square. For the phrase to have come from that source people must have had    occasion to use it, and that appears not to be the case with Snakes and    Ladders.
Hopscotch
This playground game is played on a grid of numbered squares. The    precise rules of the game vary from place to place but it usually involves    players hopping from square to square, missing out the square containing their thrown stone. They go from one to (usually) eight or ten and then back to    square one.
The game's name derives from 'scotch', which    was used from the 17th century to denote a line scored on the ground and, of    course, hopping. It was referred to in the 1677 edition of Robert Winstanley's    satirical almanac Poor    Robin:
"The time when School-boys should play at      Scotch-hoppers."
Each of the above three explanations is  plausible enough to gain supporters. As is usual with phrases of uncertain  origin, most people are happy to believe the first explanation they hear.  There's no real evidence to put the origin beyond reasonable doubt, and so it  remains uncertain.
Whatever the source, 1952 is surprisingly late  as the earliest printing for a phrase that was certainly in the spoken language  much earlier than that and there are many hearsay examples from at least thirty  years earlier. Perhaps a printed source from before 1952 will yield the  truth?
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely
Origin
Absolute monarchies are those in which all  power is given to or, as is more often the case, taken by, the monarch. Examples  of absolute power corrupting are Roman emperors (who declared themselves gods)  and Napoleon Bonaparte (who declared himself an emperor).
"Absolute  power corrupts absolutely" arose as part of a quotation by the expansively named  and impressively hirsute John  Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902). The historian and  moralist, who was otherwise known simply as Lord Acton, expressed this opinion  in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887:
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power    corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad  men."
The text is a favourite of collectors  of quotations and is always included in anthologies. If you are looking for the  exact "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" wording,  then Acton is your man. He didn't invent the idea though; quotations very like  it had been uttered by several authors well before 1887. Primary amongst them  was another English politician with no shortage of names - William Pitt the Elder, Earl of  Chatham and British Prime  Minister from 1766 to 1778, who said something similar in a speech to the UK  House of Lords in 1770:
"Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds    of those who possess it"
Acton is likely to have taken his lead from the  writings of the French republican poet and politician, again a generously titled  individual - Alphonse Marie  Louis de Prat de Lamartine. An English translation of  Lamartine's essay France and  England: a Vision of the Future was published in London in 1848 and  included this text:
It is not only the slave or serf who is    ameliorated in becoming free... the master himself did not gain less in every    point of view,... for absolute power corrupts the best  natures.
Whether it is Lamartine or his anonymous  English translator that can claim to have coined 'absolute power corrupts' we  can't be sure, but we can be sure that it wasn't Lord Acton.
Go the whole hog
To perform some act or adopt some opinion fully  and thoroughly.
Origin
'Go the whole hog' is an American expression.  Whilst the word 'hog' has been in use in England since the 14th century, by the  time that the phrase was coined, 'hog' had been largely superseded there by  'pig'. No one in the UK 'went the whole hog' until the phrase migrated east from  the USA in the 1830s.
The expression derives from a rather obscure satirical work by the  English poet and hymn writer, William Cowper. Written at a time when Christian  authors felt no misgivings about poking fun at other religions, the piece teases  Muslims over the supposed ambiguity of the restrictions against eating pork as  specified in the Qur'an. The gist of the poem is that, while sampling each part  of a hog to test which part wasn't permissible to eat, the whole hog is  eaten.
The Love of the World Reproved: or,  Hypocrisy Detected, William Cowper, 1782:
Thus says the prophet of the Turk;
Good    musselman, abstain from pork!
There is a part in every swine
No friend    or follower of mine
May taste, whate'er his inclination,
On pain of    excommunication.
These    choose the back, the belly those;
By some 'tis confidently said
He meant    not to forbid the head,
While others at that doctrine rail,
And piously    prefer the tail.
Thus, conscience freed from every clog,
Mahometans eat    up the hog.
Cowper may have had only a loose grasp of  Islamic theology, but he did influence others who later took up the phrase 'the  whole hog' to mean 'the whole thing'.
'Go the whole hog' first started appearing in  print in newspapers in the USA in 1827 and the earliest example that I can find  is from the New York paper The  Commercial Advertiser, December 28, 1827. The use of the phrase became  widespread during the United States presidential election of 1828, in which the  enthusiastic supporters of Andrew Jackson were called 'whole hog' Jacksonites.  An early example of that usage is found in The Middlesex Gazette, January  1828:
Mr. Barbour, you know, was formerly the    Speaker, but not being willing "to go the whole hog," as the Jacksonites have    it, they would not permit him again to be elevated to that high    station.
A turn up for the books
Meaning
An unexpected piece of good fortune.
Origin
Since the 1820s or thereabouts, the term 'turn-up' has been used to  mean 'a surprise; an example of good fortune'. The reference was to cards or  dice, which are 'turned up' by chance. Specifically, the 'turn up' was referred  to in the game of cribbage. At the start of a game of cribbage a member of one  team cuts the pack and a member of the other turns up the top card. If this is a  Jack, the second team gets an extra point. The point is called 'one for his  nob', or 'one for his nibs' - the Jack being one of the 'Royal' cards and 'nibs'  being slang for 'a person of importance'.
'Turn up' was defined by John Camden Hotten in  1859, in A Dictionary of  Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words:
Turn up: An unexpected slice of    luck.
That's straightforward enough, but why would a  turn up be 'for the books'? Books can be  cooked , one can  go  by  them  and you can  be in  someone's bad  books, but why would you turn up for  them?
The phrase was originally 'a turn up for the  book'. At 18th and 19th century English race meetings when bets were placed the  punter's name and wager were written down in a notebook. Not unreasonably, this  process was called 'making a book'. If a race was won by a horse that the  'bookmaker' had no record of in his book, he had a 'turn up' and kept all the  wagered money. Camden Hotten was good enough to come to our aid again with his  extended definition of 'turn up':
Among sporting men bookmakers are said to    have a turn up when an unbacked horse wins.
So, 'a turn up for the book' translates as a  stroke of good luck for the bookmakers. The earliest example that I can find of  the expression in print is from a report, in the Leeds Intelligencer newspaper, of the success of a horse  called Blackdown at the Doncaster races in August 1863:
A rare turn-up for    the book-makers, the majority of whom had never written Blackdown's name    in their books.
Stand and deliver
A demand for money, often associated with  English highwaymen.
Origin
Highwaymen are up there with pirates as the  anti-heroes of literature and B-feature films. Their flamboyant and audacious  image provides ready-made stock characters. The image is far from the reality;  pirates didn't bellow ' shiver me timbers ' or desport themselves with the  obligatory eye-patches, peg-legs or Johnny Depp style braids and earrings.  Likewise, as we shall see, highwaymen were often little more than what we would  now call muggers, although some highwaymen did fit into the 'gentleman of the  road' persona that dramatists later portrayed. Nor was 'stand and deliver' an  invention of screenwriters, but a very real threat heard by 18th century  travellers.
Highway robbery was defined by the English  legal system as any robbery which took place on the King's Highway. It was  viewed as a particularly serious crime because it interfered with the freedom of  movement, which was considered a fundamental right.
So, why 'stand and deliver'? The word 'stand'  has been used to mean 'come to a halt' since the 16th century. Shakespeare used  it in Two Gentlemen of  Verona, 1591:
"Stand sir, and throw us that you have    about'ye."
The expression 'stand and deliver' must have  been established in the language by 1714, as Alexander Smith included it in his  reference work The History of the Lives of the Most Noted  Highwaymen:
"He order'd him to Stand and Deliver."
The Old Bailey was and is England's primary  criminal court and, fortunately for the etymological community, it houses an  invaluable documentary resource, the largest body of text detailing the lives of  the common people of England, namely The Proceedings of the Old  Bailey, 1674-1913. That record lists an early use of the term 'stand and  deliver' in the case of Robert Jackson, tried for Highway Robbery on 7th  September 1720. Jackson was indicted for "Assaulting John Andrews on the  High Way, putting him in Fear, and taking from him a Silver Watch value £4  10s". A witness testified:
The Prisoner clapt a Pistol to a Child's Head    and said [to Andrews], G - d D - n you, stand and deliver your Money    and Watch; and that he saw the Prisoner clap a Pistol to Andrews's Breast, and    take his Watch; that he is sure the Prisoner is the same  Person.
That's an example of the common pedestrian highwayman. For an example  of the mounted 'gentleman of the road' we need to look to "Captain" James  MacLaine. MacLaine was a notorious and prolific highwayman who specialised in  robbing from the rich and famous. The accompanying picture, helpfully entitled  'An Exact Representation of Maclaine the Highwayman Robbing Lord Eglington  on Hounslow Heath on the 26th June. 1750' shows MacLaine in action. He  developed a taste for finery (most of it stolen from his victims) and text below  the picture states that MacLaine was 'A tall young fellow and commonly very gay  in his dress'. He became something of a celebrity and was the model for Macheath, the antihero of John  Gay's The Beggar's  Operaand of Mack the  Knife in Brecht's Threepenny Opera.
MacLaine was also the source of the 'Dandy Highwayman'  imagery used by Adam Ant in his 1981 song Stand and Deliver.
Just in case people didn't get the idea, from  the 1750s onward the 'stand and deliver' command was extended to include 'your  money or your life'. An early example, also from the proceedings of the Old  Bailey, is found in the trial of James Abbot for highway robbery on 27th  February 1754. Abbot's victim gave this testimony:
When we came into Hyde Park the prisoner,    Abbot, came up to me, and put a pistol to my breast, and said, D - n you,    deliver to me this moment, and make no noise, for if you do I will shoot you    dead. I will have your money or your life before you wag [move] a    step farther.
Like most of his compatriots, Abbot came to a sticky end. The Old Bailey records show that Robert Jackson, James Abbot and  James MacLaine were all hanged for their crimes.
Highway robbery cases are no longer brought to  trial in the UK - armed robberies are tried as such regardless of where they are  committed. The mounted robber disappeared from English roads in the late 1820s  and the last prosecution for highway robbery was heard at the Old Bailey in  1897.
These days the highwayman's best-known lines  are more likely to be found in comedy skits than on the highway. Jack Benny got  good mileage out of the 'your money or your life' when he used it as a gag that  played on his tight-fisted stage persona. The gag's set-up was that a mugger  approached Benny and demanded, "Your money or your life". After a long pause,  the mugger repeated the demand and Benny replied, "I'm thinking it over".  Spike Milligan  also used the phrase to comic effect;  his punch line was a typically surreal "Take my life; I'm saving for my  birthday".
Cock-a-hoop
In a state of exuberant elation.
Origin
First, a health warning. If you are hoping to find a straightforward explanation of the origin of the term 'cock-a-hoop' here you will be disappointed. The expression has one of the most Byzantine etymologies of all the phrases in English. If you aren't daunted by that caveat, read on...
The belief in false word and phrase origins, otherwise known as folk-etymology, relies on someone coming up with a hypothesis about the origin of an expression that appears plausible. If enough people believe the theory it will be circulated and enter the group consciousness (see the ludicrous but apparently immortal  Life in the 1500s  for examples of such tales). Until recently, we had to rely on tour guides to invent and distribute such stories, now we have legions of the Internet. 'Cock-a-hoop' is unique in my experience in that its origin has been clouded by the intervention of two pieces of 17th century guesswork. The lexicographer Thomas Blount wrote a dictionary entitled Glossographia and the 1670 edition of the work included a speculation on the source of 'Cock-on-hoop':
Our Ancestors call'd that the Cock which we call a Spigget, or perhaps they used such Cocks in their vessels, as are still retained in water-pipes; the Cock being taken out, and laid on the hoop of the vessel, they used to drink up the ale as it ran out without intermission and then they were Cock-on-Hoop , i.e. at the height of mirth and jollity; a saying still retained'.
This view was probably derived from early texts, like John Palsgrave's 1540 translation of the Latin text The Comedye of Acolastus:
"Let us sette the cocke on the hope and make good chere within doores."
Plausible indeed, but we don't really know what 'cocke' or 'hope' (hoop) Palsgrave was referring to - the OED has numerous meanings for both words. The problem with Blount's account is that he simply asserts it to be fact, without offering any evidence. People believed it - he was a lexicographer after all - and that casts doubt on the usefulness as evidence of any use of the phrase post 1670, as they are just repetitions of popular belief rather than of fact. Had Blount been a little more methodical, he would have assembled all of the plausible theories and looked for evidence. One possible origin that he ignored was the pub signs that show a cock and a hoop, which have existed since at least the 14th century - long predating his theory. The Clause Roll of Edward III, circa 1335, lists many pub names that include 'hoop', including 'the Hen on the Hoop' and 'The Cock on the Hoop'. Some of these pubs still exist. Another theory was that the expression was a translation of the French 'coc-a-huppe'. This was suggested by Edward Phillips, a rival of Blunt's, in the dictionary New World of Words, 1678:
Cock-a-hoop (French coc-a-huppe, a Cock with a Crest). All upon the Spur, high in mirth, or standing upon high terms.
For good measure, Phillips also repeated Blount's theory that 'cock-a-hoop' derived from "the Staffordshire custom of laying the Cock or Spigot upon the Barrel, for the company to drink without intermission", which tends to undermine one's confidence in him. Blount clearly wasn't impressed and went to the trouble of publishing A World of Errors Discovered in the 'New World of Words'.
Whether the original meaning of 'cock-a-hoop' was 'turn on the taps, let the liquor flow and cast off all restraint' or 'stand on the barrel and crow with exaltation' (or something else entirely) we aren't ever likely to now know. Suffice it to say, if you come up with and publish a theory of your own, someone will believe it.
Jack in the box
Meaning
A toy consisting of a box containing a figure with a spring, which leaps up when the lid is raised.
Origin
On the face of it, a Jack-in-the-box is a harmless and amusing children's toy. 'Jack' is usually a clown figure, which pops up on a coiled spring when the box lid is opened. The clowning purists amongst you will probably by now be muttering that they aren't clowns but augustes. You would be right of course. Clowns have white-face make-up and usually wear pointed hats and ruffled collars. Augustes are the red-nosed guys with oversized trousers and squirty flowers in their buttonholes.
Jack was clearly intended to be a comic figure but not everyone finds him amusing. Fear of clowns has become a widespread enough condition lately for someone to have invented a name for it - coulrophobia. The word has no real etymological pedigree and was coined in the past twenty or so years.
The expression 'Jack in the box' existed for centuries before anyone thought of putting spring-loaded puppets inside boxes. The first reference that is known in print is found in John Foxe's Actes & Monuments, 1563, in which he reported a comment made by Bishop Nicholas Ridley:
[There are] railyng bils against the Lords supper, terming it Iack of the boxe, the sacrament of the halter, round Robin, with like unsemely termes.
It is clear that the term was used to represent something unsavoury and insulting. Very soon afterwards there is another reference that shows the phrase to have a meaning close to those who peddled ' a pig in a poke '. 'Jack in the box' was the name given to a swindler who cheated tradesmen by substituting empty boxes for the full ones that were expected. Such a 'Jack' is found in James Cranstoun's reprinting of Satirical Poems of the time of the Reformation. An anonymous poem, entitled The Bird in the Cage, was first published in 1570:
Jak in the bokis, for all thy mokis a vengeance mot the fall! 
Thy subteltie and palzardrie our fredome bringis in thrall. 
[Cheat, for all of your mockery revenge must be taken! Your cunning and devious behaviour threatens our freedom.]
There is a theory that the expression derives from the story of Sir John Schorne, a celebrated 12th century pious Christian who was believed by the people of Norfolk to possess healing powers. He was said to have caught the Devil and held him captive in his boot. Several English church screens still contain images of Schorne with the Devil peeping out of a boot. This was (much later) said to be the origin of the name of the toy Jack-in-the-box'. With no real evidence that connects Schorne to the expression, and 700 years later we aren't likely to find any, coupled with the fact that the children's toy didn't emerge until the 18th century, we can reasonably discount that supposed origin and hand Sir John back to the good people of Norfolk.
'Jack in the box' was also the name given to a type of firework and this is found in John Babington's Pyrotechnia, 1635:
Another, [firework] which I call Iack in a box.
The 18th century inventors of the children's pop-up toy needed a name for it. It was a figure in a box that jumped up and gave people a fright. What better than to do what others in various fields had already done and adopt the existing 'Jack-in-the-box' expression?
'Jack in the box' was first used as the name of the toy in the 1702 text Infernal Wanderer:
Up started every one in his seat, like a Jack in a box...
So, Jack-in-the-box was variously a religious insult, a swindler, the Devil and an incendiary device - clearly a character not to be meddled with. Even non-coulrophobic children might do well to be wary of Jack. He may not have been real but, as a bogeyman, he had some impressive credentials.
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth
Meaning
Don't be ungrateful when you receive a gift.
Origin
Proverbs  are 'short and expressive sayings, in common use, which are recognized as conveying some accepted truth or useful advice'. This example, also often expressed as 'never look a gift horse in the mouth', is as pertinent today as it ever was.
As horses develop they grow more teeth and their existing teeth begin to change shape and project further forward. Determining a horse's age from its teeth is a specialist task, but it can be done. This incidentally is also the source of another teeth/age related phrase -  long in the tooth .
The advice given in the 'don't look...' proverb is: when receiving a gift be grateful for what it is; don't imply you wished for more by assessing its value.
As with most proverbs the origin is ancient and unknown. We have some clues with this one however. The phrase was originally "don't look a given horse in the mouth" and first appears in print in 1546 in John Heywood's A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue, where he gives it as:
"No man ought to looke a geuen hors in the mouth."
Heywood is an interesting character in the development of English. He was employed at the courts of Henry VIII and Mary I as a singer, musician, and playwright. His Proverbs is a comprehensive collection of those sayings known at the time and includes many that are still with us:
- Many hands make light work
- Rome wasn't built in a day
- A good beginning makes a good ending
and so on. These were expressed in the literary language of the day, as in "would yee both eat your cake, and have your cake?", but the modern versions are their obvious descendents.
We can't attribute these to Heywood himself; he collected them from the literary works of the day and from common parlance. He can certainly be given the credit for introducing many proverbs to a wide and continuing audience, including one that Shakespeare later borrowed -  All's well that ends well .
Butterfingers
Meaning
A name playfully applied to someone who fails to catch a ball or lets something slip from their fingers.
Origin
In the week of the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth (7th February 1812), I thought it would be nice to include a phrase coined by him. It ought not to be too difficult to find one, after all, Dickens ranks sixth on the 'number of English words coined by an individual author' list. Passing over contenders like 'slow-coach' and ' cloak and dagger ' I alighted on 'butterfingers', which several authorities say was invented by Dickens. Not quite a phrase but, as it was coined as the hyphenated 'butter-fingers', it's close enough. Dickens used the term in The Pickwick Papers (more properly calledThe Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club), 1836:
At every bad attempt at a catch, and every failure to stop the ball, he launched his personal displeasure at the head of the devoted individual in such denunciations as 'Ah, ah! - stupid' - 'Now, butter-fingers' - 'Muff' - 'Humbug' - and so forth.
It seemed as though that was all there was to say about the word/phrase but, as I usually like to add a little more, I delved further. The British Library's excellent new database of 19th century newspapers turned up a reference to 'butter-fingers' in the Yorkshire newspaperThe Leeds Intelligencer dated May 1823. Pre-Pickwick, clearly. Looking closer, it appeared that the writer was quoting from what he called 'a scarce book' - The English Housewife. Delving again, I found that the book, written by the English writer Gervase Markham in 1615, scarce as it may have been in 1823, is still available today. Markham's recipe for a good housewife was:
'First, she must be cleanly in body and garments; she must have a quick eye, a curious nose, a perfect taste, and ready ear; she must not be butter-fingered, sweet-toothed, nor faint-hearted - for the first will let everything fall; the second will consume what it should increase; and the last will lose time with too much niceness.
Markham's views aren't quite what would be accepted now, any more than his remedy for the plague - 'smell a nosegay made of the tasselled end of a ship rope', but he does at least make it clear that 'butterfingers' was in use in 1615 with the same meaning we have for it today, that is, someone likely to drop things - as if their hands were smeared with butter, like a cook's.
Many of the later examples of 'butterfingers' in print relate to the game of cricket, which was and still is the principal ball-catching game in England. The term is often used as an amiable taunt when someone fails to make an easy catch. As the word spread to other countries, notably America, it was taken into the language of the local catching game, i.e. baseball, and 'no-hoper' teams were unkindly given that name. The Salt Lake Tribune reported on such a team in May 1899:
'The Butterfingers will cross bats with the Salt Lake Juniors at Calder's Park Tuesday'.
As for Dickens, he may have missed out on 'butterfingers' but he has many other words and phrases to lay claim to, and he did write some exceedingly good books.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
Meaning
It's better to have a lesser but certain advantage than the possibility of a greater one that may come to nothing.
Origin
This proverb refers back to mediaeval falconry where a bird in the hand (the falcon) was a valuable asset and certainly worth more than two in the bush (the prey).
The first citation of the expression in print in its currently used form is found in John Ray's A Hand-book of Proverbs, 1670, in which he lists it as:
"A [also 'one'] bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"
By how long the phrase predates Ray's publishing isn't clear, as variants of it were known for centuries before 1670. The earliest English version of the proverb is from the Bible and was translated into English in Wycliffe's version in 1382, although Latin texts have it from the 13th century:
"Ecclesiastes IX - A living dog is better than a dead lion."
Alternatives that explicitly mention birds in hand come later. The earliest of those is in Hugh Rhodes' The Boke of Nurture or Schoole of Good Maners, circa 1530:
"A byrd in hand - is worth ten flye at large."
John Heywood, the 16th century collector of proverbs, recorded another version in his ambitiously titled A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue, 1546:
"Better one byrde in hande than ten in the wood."
The expression fits well into the  catalogue of English proverbs , which are often warnings, especially warnings about hubris or risk taking. Some of the better known examples that warn against getting carried away by that exciting new prospect are: ' All that glitters is not gold ', ' Fools rush in where angels fear to tread ', ' Look before you leap ', ' Marry in haste, repent at leisure ', ' The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley '.
The Bird in Hand was adopted as a pub name in England in the Middle Ages and many of this name still survive.
English migrants to America took the expression with them and 'bird in hand' must have been known there by 1734 as this was the year in which a small town in Pennsylvania was founded with that name.
Handle with kid gloves
Handle a situation, or a person or an object, delicately and gingerly.
Origin
Kid gloves are, of course, gloves made from the skin of a young goat. I say 'of course' but, in fact, when they were first fashioned in the 18th century they were more often made from lambskin, as that was easier to come by. They were clearly not intended for use when you were pruning the hedge and wearing kid gloves was the sartorial equivalent of pale white skin, that is, it indicated that the wearer was rich enough to indulge in a life of genteel indoor idleness. The earliest mentions of kid gloves are from England in the 1730s and the following is a typical report of a wealthy gentleman, laid out in his 'Sunday best', from Bagnall's News, in The Ipswich Journal, December 1734:
"The Corpse of Mr. Thorp, A Distiller in Soho, who died a few Days since, said to be worth £10000 was put into his Coffin, quilted within with white Sattin; and after several yards of fine Holland [best-quality linen] were wrapt about his Body... on his Head was a Cap of the same Holland tied with a white Ribbond; he has about his Neck two Yards of Cambrick; a Cambrick Handkerchief between his Hands, on which he had a pair of white Kid Gloves: and in this manner he lay in state some Days and was afterwards buried in Buckinghamshire."
At that time, kid gloves were viewed as rather ostentatious and only suitable for the nouveau riche - much as heavy gold chains might be viewed today. In the 19th century, kid glove wearing was taken up by a notable member of the gentry, William Pole-Tylney-Long-Wellesley, the fourth Earl of Mornington, which might have been expected to establish them as a desirable accessory. The Preston Chronicle included this item in February 1837:
"Mr. Long Wellesley is, also, a man of excellent taste, though he rides in kid gloves, which Brummel used to say a man should be scouted [dismissed scornfully] for doing."
The dismissal of the gloves by the socialite and fashion authority Beau Brummell was enough to send them to the back of the 19th century chav wardrobe. Incidentally, I wasn't familiar with the word 'scouted' as meaning 'scorned' and when I looked it up I found this first usage in Samuel Palmer's Moral Essays, 1710:
"They pass the rhodomontade till they're expos'd and scouted."
That led me to 'rhodomontade', another word I didn't know, which turns out to mean 'to speak boastfully or bombastically'. All in all, Brummel clearly didn't think much of kid gloves and they continued not to be worn by 'persons of quality'.
In fact, the description 'kid-gloved' came to be used as an insult, implying a lack of manhood, as was recorded in The Leicester Chronicle in January 1842:
"This contraband system of political allusions appears to suit the taste and nerves of the cautious, gentlemanly, kid-gloved Conservatism, which cannot endure the shock of attending a public meeting."
It was only when the expression (and presumably also, the gloves) crossed the Atlantic that the negative connotations were lost and 'handling (or treating) with kid gloves' began to be used as we use it today, that is with the meaning 'delicately; carefully'. The New-York monthly magazine The Knickerbocker has the first example of the term in print, from 1849:
"Belligerent topics are not our forte and never was; neither do we handle them with kid gloves, when they fairly come in the way."
Cold turkey
Meaning
The sudden and complete withdrawal from an additive substance and/or the physiological effects of such a withdrawal. Also, predominantly in the U.S.A., plain speaking.
Origin
At this time of year you have probably had enough of cold turkey to last until next year's festivities. Nevertheless, here's another plateful.
The term 'cold turkey' is now predominantly used as the name of the drug withdrawal process. Also, by extension, it is used to refer to any abrupt termination of something we are accustomed to. To find the origin of the term we need to delve into the annals of American speech. Let's talk turkey.
The turkey looms large in the American psyche because of its link to early European colonists and is, as even Limies like me know, the centrepiece of the annual Thanksgiving meal. In the USA, and as far as I can tell nowhere else, 'plain speaking/getting down to business' is called 'talking cold turkey'. This usage dates from the early part of the 20th century, as in this example from The Des Moines Daily News, May 1914:
I've heard [Reverend Billy] Sunday give his 'Booze' sermon, and believe me that rascal can make tears flow out of a stone. And furthermore he talks "cold turkey". You know what I mean - calls a spade a spade.
The English newspaper The Daily Express introduced the phrase to an English audience in a January 1928 edition:
"She talked cold turkey about sex. 'Cold turkey' means plain truth in America."
'Talking cold turkey' meant no nonsense talking and its partner expression 'going cold turkey' meant no nonsense doing. To 'go cold turkey' was to get straight to the scene of the action - in at the deep end. An example of it in use is found in Debates: the official reports of the Canadian House of Commons, 1899:
I am told that other countries, for instance Australia, have gone cold turkey all the way. They have gone full metric and have experienced less difficulty in the implementation of their program over the long-term.
The earliest reference to 'cold turkey' in relation to drug withdrawal that I can find is from the Canadian newspaper The Daily Colonist, October 1921:
"Perhaps the most pitiful figures who have appeared before Dr. Carleton Simon are those who voluntarily surrender themselves. When they go before him, they [drug addicts] are given what is called the 'cold turkey' treatment."
In the state of drug withdrawal the addict's blood is directed to the internal organs, leaving the skin white and with goose bumps. It has been suggested that this is what is alluded to by 'cold turkey'. There's no evidence to support that view. For the source of 'cold turkey' we need look no further than the direct, no nonsense approach indicated by the earlier 'in at the deep end' meaning of the term.
Nail your colours to the mast
Meaning
To defiantly display one's opinions and beliefs. Also, to show one's intention to hold on to those beliefs until the end.
Origin
In 17th century nautical battles colours (flags) were struck (lowered) as a mark of submission. It was also the custom in naval warfare to direct one's cannon fire at the opponent's ship's mast, thus disabling it. If all of a ship's masts were broken the captain usually had no alternative but to surrender. If the captain decided to fight on this was marked by hoisting the colours on the remnants of the ship's rigging, i.e. by 'nailing his colours to the mast'.
It is correct to use the English spelling, rather the the US 'nail one's colors to the mast', as the phrase originated in England. It is generally agreed that the expression was coined in reference to the exploits of the crew of the Venerable, at the Battle of Camperdown, a naval engagement that was fought between English and Dutch ships as part of the French Revolutionary Wars, in 1797.
The English fleet was led by the Venerable, the flagship of Admiral Adam Duncan. The battle didn't initially go well for the English. The mainmast of Duncan's vessel was struck and the admiral's blue squadronal standard was brought down. This could have been interpreted by the rest of the fleet as meaning that Duncan had surrendered. Step forward, horny-handed son of the sea and subsequent national hero, Jack Crawford. Crawford climbed what was left of the mast with the standard and nailed it back where it was visible to the rest of the fleet. This act proved crucial in the battle and Duncan's forces were eventually victorious. Some historians believe that the victory at Camperdown proved to be the end of the dominance of the Dutch at sea and the beginning of the period in which 'Britannia ruled the waves'. Crawford returned home to Sunderland to a hero's welcome.
The stalwart reputation of English seamen soon became part of the national consciousness. An address to the House of Commons by the playwright Richard Sheridan was reported in The Edinburgh Advertiser in January 1801:
"I have no hesitation in saying that the Maritime Law is the charter of our existence, the banner under which we all should rally; it is the flag which, imitating the example of our gallant seamen, we should nail to the mast of the nation, and go down with the vessel rather than strike it!"
The first use of the precise expression 'nail your colours to the mast' that I have found is from the English newspaper The Hereford Journal, August 1807. This reported a naval engagement between British and American ships in which the US captain surrendered without a fight, much to the disgust of his military superiors:
"You [Commodore James Barron] ought to have nailed your colours to the mast, and have fought whilst a timber remained on your ship."
Whether or not Jack Crawford was the first to 'nail his colours to the mast' we can't be completely sure, but it does look highly likely. The phrase wasn't known before his exploit and was widely used soon afterwards. Despite his heroic status, Crawford died a pauper and a drunkard and was buried in an unmarked grave. The local community raised a fund to erect a gravestone and later a commemorative statue. If you do have any doubts about Jack's role in linguistic history, it might be wise not to mention it in Sunderland.
Second-guess
1. To criticize and offer advice, with the benefit of hindsight.
2. To foresee the actions of others, before they have come to a decision themselves.
Origin
A commonly used meaning of 'to second-guess' is to criticize the actions of others, after the event. The event in questions was, and often still is, a sporting event. The term is derived as what is known as a back-formation. As back-formations loom large in etymology I'll break off to explain what they are.
New words are usually created from existing words. For example, we all know what 'fishing' means and, armed with that knowledge we could easily coin the word 'fisherman' and a phrase like 'fishing for compliments'. Sometimes though, the order that words and phrases are derived in isn't so obvious. For example, people who rob from houses have been called 'burglars' since the 13th century and it might be supposed that they got their name from being engaged in 'burglary'. However, it wasn't until the 19th century that the legal profession decided that 'that thing that burglars do' needed to be given a name and hence 'burglary' was coined as a back-formation from 'burglar'. Likewise, 'narration' and 'scavenge', which were coined centuries after 'narrator' and 'scavenger'.
The same back route was taken by the phrase 'second-guess'. The umpire in a baseball game used to be called, rather unkindly, 'the guesser'. People who were continually telling the guesser, the manager or the players what they were doing wrong were known as 'secondguessers' and were so defined in the Sporting News Record Book, 1937:
Secondguesser, one who is continually criticizing moves of players and manager.
Another meaning of 'to second-guess' is to anticipate what others might do in a particular situation. This is also of American origin but, somewhat more impressively, refers to a guess made before rather than after the event. An early example of its use comes from Broadcasting magazine, December 1941:
Do not try to second-guess or master-mind our military officials. Leave this for established military analysts and experts, who are experienced enough to await the facts before drawing conclusions.
Security blanket
Meaning
1. A small familiar blanket or other soft fabric item carried by a child for reassurance.
2. A form of harness for a baby's crib.
3. All-encompassing military and political security measures.
Origin
The term 'security blanket', also known as 'comfort blanket', was coined by Charles Shulz for his Peanuts cartoon strip. That's what most references will tell you. It's always a pleasure to swim against the tide and here's an opportunity. In fact, the term 'security blanket' wasn't coined by Charles Shulz for his Peanuts cartoon strip. The derivation of 'security blanket' involves a rather meandering tale, which goes like this:
Security blankets were known to Americans in the 1920s and were at that date overblankets which were clipped into babies' cribs to stop the occupants falling out. The accompanying advert is from the New York newspaper The Republican Press, November 1925, advertising fasteners for such a blanket for 59 cents.
The tale now moves on to World War II. The term 'security blanket' was then used to refer to strict security measures that were taken to keep Allied military plans from falling into the hands of the Germans. The term was coined in that context by the US military while fighting in Europe. For example, this report from the Alabama newspaper The Dothan Eagle, September 1944:
Reports being issued at Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's headquarters sometimes were as much as 48 hours behind the armies because of a security blanket thrown over the operations.
Incidentally, another article from the same page as the above is titled 'British Take Brussels', which is timely as this [28th December] is the only week of the year that the headline could be recycled. For those of a non-British persuasion, many in Britain pile their Christmas dinner plates with brussels sprouts with some enthusiasm but reject them with distaste for the rest of the year.
The emergence of the military use of 'security blanket' about twenty years after the use of the term in a domestic setting does suggest the possibility that those coining a new meaning for it were the babies that were tucked up under security blankets a generation earlier.
Now we move on another step, to the use of the expression as 'a small familiar comforter for babies and toddlers'. Now we get to Charles Shulz, right? Not quite. Shulz drew the character Linus van Pelt with a comfort blanket in the Peanuts cartoon strip in June 1954. It wasn't until 1956, in Good Grief, More Peanuts, that the item was given a name by Linus:
"This is a 'security and happiness' blanket. All little kids carry them."
By that date the term had been in use elsewhere. The November 1954 issue of the California newspaper The Daily Review included this piece by a staff writer, under the name of 'Bev':
'Security blanket. My younger child is one year old. When she finds a fuzzy blanket or a fleecy coat she presses her cheek against it and sucks her thumb.'
As different as chalk and cheese
Meaning
Two things that are very different from each other.
Origin
We have hundreds of phrases to indicate the similarity of one thing with another and  similes  like ' as alike as two peas in a pod ' are commonplace in everyday speech. However, as far as I know, there is only one phrase that does the opposite and explicitly refers to the difference between things and that is 'as different as chalk and cheese'. This is an old expression and the earliest citation of it is in John Gower's Middle English text Confessio Amantis, 1390:
Lo, how they feignen chalk for chese.
Tourist boards in several of the chalkland areas of the UK try to place the phrase's origin in their locality and allude to vague connections between chalk and the local cheese. None of these are convincing and they clearly owe more to marketing than to etymology. So, how did the phrase come about?
There must have been a time in the development of English when we had no standard phrase to express the idea that two things were 'as different as X and Y'. When someone coined such a phrase, and that someone may well have been Gower in 1390, clearly he needed candidates for the roles of X and Y. That doesn't sound difficult, after all most things are different from most other things.
"Maybe, 'as different as a cormorant and a lamp-post'", thinks our coiner, "or 'as different as floorboards and greengrocers'". "No, 'as different as chalk and cheese' sounds better". Why? For no better reason that the fact the 'chalk' and 'cheese' are short and snappy words that alliterate. The English language is packed full of phrases that contain pairs of rhyming or alliterating words - often just because the person who coined them liked the sound of them; for example,  hocus-pocus ,  the bee's knees ,  riff-raff  etc.
A modern-day spin-off of 'chalk and cheese' is 'chalk and talk'. This refers to the traditional teaching method where the teacher stood at the front to address the class while writing on the blackboard with a stick of chalk (which those of a certain age will well remember). The phrase emerged in the UK in the 1930s but had a shortish run as a widely used expression as classrooms began to be equipped with whiteboards in the 1960s. 'Dry-wipe marker pen and talk' never caught on.
Weasel words
Ambiguous or quibbling speech.
Origin
It has long been a widespread belief that weasels suck the yolks from bird's eggs, leaving only the empty shell. This belief is the basis of the term 'weasel words', used to describe statements that have had the life sucked out of them. The expression refers to words that are added to make a statement sound more legitimate and impressive but which are in fact unsubstantiated and meaningless. Examples of weasel words are 'people say that...', 'studies show that...', 'up to 50% or more...'.
There is now some doubt amongst naturalists as to whether weasels do suck eggs. The tiny mammals are certainly ferocious and, pound for pound, amongst the most dangerous predators on the planet, being easily able to kill an entire coopful of chickens that are hundreds of times their weight. They have a bad reputation with country dwellers but the egg-sucking behaviour is unproven. Whether or not they actually suck eggs, Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed they did. The Bard didn't coin the expression 'weasel words', but he came very close, when he made two references to the supposed habits of weasels:
The weazel Scot Comes sneaking, and so sucks the princoly egg. - Henry V, 1598
I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weazel sucks eggs. - As You Like It, 1600
That's as close as we get to the actual phrase in the Tudor period and it wasn't until the turn of the 20th century in the USA that the phrase 'weasel words' first occurred in print. In 1900, Stewart Chaplin published a story in The Century Illustrated Magazine entitled Stained Glass Political Platform, which contains this exchange:
"I am the chairman of your committee on platform"... "And like most platforms," continued St. John, "it contains plenty of what I call weasel words."
"And what may weasel words be?"
"Why, weasel words are words that suck all the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks an egg and leaves the shell."
In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt, then Colonel Roosevelt, was reported in various US newspapers as saying that he liked the Republican state platform because it contained no "weasel words". In September 1916, the New York Times published a piece in which Roosevelt refuted the notion that he had stolen the phrase from Chaplin and claimed to have coined it independently in 1879:
Colonel Roosevelt, on his way here this morning from Portland, Me., told a Times reporter how he happened to use the expression "weasel words" in describing some of President Wilson's utterances months ago. After the expression had been widely quoted, somebody discovered that it had been used years ago by the writer of a magazine article in the Century Magazine, and the Colonel was charged with having plagiarized the writer.
"About thirty-seven years ago." Colonel Roosevelt said in talking of the origin of the expression. "I was going up a mountain in the Maine woods in a carriage, driven by Dave Sewall. We saw an old man along the roadside. When we passed Dave Sewall said:
"That there man can do a lot of funny things with this language of ours. He can take a word and weasel it around and suck the meat out of it like a weasel sucks the meat out of an egg, until it don't mean anything at all. The Colonel said the expression [weasel words] occurred to him when he read some of President Wilson's notes.
It is possible that [there are some good weasel words for you] Roosevelt coined the expression but, of course, his later recollections aren't any kind of proof of that. If circumstantial evidence counts for anything then Roosevelt's etymological track record might be called into account. In 1900, he described the phrase ' speak softly and carry a big stick ' as a 'West African proverb'. Where he got that idea from is unclear - there's certainly no evidence to support it.
I can't finish without adding the old jest about how to tell a weasel from a stoat - 'one is weasily recognized, the other is stoatally different'.
The whole nine yards
Every now and then I feel the urge to go back to the Holy Grail of etymology - 'the whole nine yards'. I was prompted to take another look at it this week by the unveiling of the British Library Newspaper Archive. This gives online access to a vast store of British newspapers, which will eventually include the majority of all newspapers printed in Britain since the early 1700s. Just the place to try a search for an early printed example of 'the whole nine yards' n'est-ce pas? Well, yes and no.
If you aren't familiar with the search for the origin of that elusive expression, here's the story so far...
For reasons that aren't clear, 'the whole nine yards' provokes more speculative derivations than any other phrase. Many people are convinced they know the origin but aren't able to provide documentary evidence to support their chosen belief.
The earliest known citation of the phrase in print is from 1962. In May 1961, the American athlete Ralph Boston broke the world long jump record with a jump of 27 feet 1/2 inch. No one had previously jumped 27 feet. This was big news at the time and surely cried out for this headline:"Boston jumps the whole nine yards"
If the phrase was in circulation before 1961, it wasn't known to that most slang-aware troop, newspaper journalists, and no one came up with that line, which is missing from all newspaper archives. The absence of the expression in print prior to the 1960s argues strongly against any of the supposed mediaeval, Victorian or even World War II origins.
The weight of circumstantial evidence is that the phrase originated in America in the early 1960s but it isn't known who coined the term.
Sadly, the new archive yielded no results. That's not altogether surprising, as it is reasonably certain that the phrase is of 20th century American origin. The British Library database did come up with a story from 1821 of a stagecoach toppling off a cliff and falling 'full nine yards', but that doesn't carry the current meaning of the phrase and appears to be a straightforward literal report.
Nevertheless, the digitisation of old manuscripts provides etymologists with a gateway to sources that were previously inaccessible. The American academic Stephen Goranson recently found this piece in a newly digitised copy of Michigan's Voices: A Literary Quarterly & Arts Magazine, Fall 1962:
... real civilized living in the modern urban home - then the dog would catch on and go ki-yi-yi-ing from one to the other of the shouting pyjama clad participants - mad, mad, mad, the consequence of house, home, kids, respectability, status as a college professor and the whole nine yards, as a brush salesman who came by the house was fond of saying, ...
Also in late 1962, this passage appeared in a letter to the editor in an issue of Car Life, also now available in online format:
Your staff of testers cannot fairly appraise the Chevrolet Impala sedan, with all nine yards of goodies, against the Plymouth Savoy.
The meanings of the word 'yard' are many and varied. We have linear, square or cubic yards, also yard-arms, steelyards etc. This is the source of the variability of the many guesses at the phrase's origin. These include:
The nine cubic yards capacity of US concrete trucks. Widely circulated, although clearly nonsense as even the largest concrete mixers were smaller than 9 cubic yards in the 1960s.
World War II aircraft. There are several aircraft-related theories:
The length of US bombers' bomb racks.
The length of the RAF Spitfire's machine gun bullet belts.
The length of ammunition belts in ground based anti-aircraft turrets, etc. 
The amount of material used in making top quality suits. Supporters of this theory sometimes relate it to 'dressed to the nines'.
The derivation is naval and the yards are shipyards. Another naval version is that the yards are the spars of sailing ships. The name for the spar that hold the sails is a yard. Large sailing ships had three masts, often with three yards on each. The theory goes that ships in battle can continue changing direction as new sails are unfurled. Only when the last sail, on the ninth yard, is used do the enemy know in which direction the ship is finally headed.
Despite the certainty of the proponents of each of these explanations, at best only one of them can be correct. The evidence argues against any of them being the origin of the phrase. What the above digitised documentary evidence actually points to is that the phrase in its earliest incarnations refers to a 'laundry list' of items.
Speculation will of course continue until a definitive source for the phrase is found. I'm not holding my breath but, if an origin is found, I've no doubt that it will be as the result of a search of a digitised archive.
The writing is on the wall
Meaning
Imminent danger has become apparent.
Origin
'The writing is on the wall' is also sometimes expressed as 'the handwriting is on the wall' or as 'mene mene'. The first of those variations is an obvious synonym but what does 'mene mene' mean? This is a shortening of 'mene mene tekel upharsin', which is of Aramaic origin. If your Aramaic isn't that strong you can get some guidance from the Bible, Daniel 5, in the story of Belshazzar's feast. To cut a long Old Testament story short, Belshazzar was indulging in a drunken revelry and debasing sacred temple vessels by using them as wine goblets when a disembodied hand wrote 'mene mene tekel upharsin' on the palace wall.
On the face of it, and using a literal translation, this appeared meaningless. The expression seemed to mean 'two minas, a shekel and two parts' or alternatively 'numbered, weighed, divided'. None of this meant much to Belshazzar, who decided that he needed further interpretation and sent for the Jewish exile Daniel. It then became clear that the phrase was an elaborate wordplay, relying on the fact that each word can denote a different coin, and the third word can be interpreted as 'Persia'. Daniel's interpretation, as recorded in the first easily understood English version of the Bible, the  King James Version , 1611, was:
And this the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This the interpretation of the thing: 
MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.
TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.
PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.
The point of the moral tale was that Belshazzar couldn't see the warning that was apparent to others because he was engrossed with his sinning ways.
The subtlety of the biblical wordplay is now somewhat lost on those of us that don't speak ancient Aramaic. Perhaps a flavour of the style can be conveyed by comparing it to the lyrics of the popular World War II novelty song Mairzy Doats:
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy diveya
A kiddley divey too, wooden shoe?
Literally, that's meaningless but a wartime Daniel could have translated it into its actual meaning:
Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy,
A kid'll eat ivy too, wouldn't you?
'Writing on the wall' began to be used figuratively, that is providing warnings where no actual writing or walls are involved, from the early 18th century; for example, Jonathan Swift's Miscellaneous works, 1720:
A baited Banker thus desponds, 
From his own Hand foresees his Fall; 
They have his Soul who have his Bonds; 
'Tis like the Writing on the Wall.
Pig's ear
As 'pig's ear' -  Cockney rhyming slang  for beer. 
As 'in a pig's ear' - an expression of disbelief. 
As 'make a pig's ear of ' - make a mess or muddle.
Origin
The  Cockney rhyming slang  version of 'pig's ear' is easiest to explain. It's one of the earliest examples of the form and appears in D. W. Barrett's Life & Work among Navvies, 1880:
"Now, Jack, I'm goin' to get a tiddley wink of pig's ear."
That's easy enough to decipher as "I'm going to get a drink of beer", although you would need a Cockney for an explanation of why 'tiddley wink of pig's ear' was thought to be an improvement on 'drink of beer'. 'Pig's ear' rhymes with 'beer' and that's usually enough for rhyming slang. Franklin's Dictionary of Rhyming Slang lists several alternatives for 'beer' - 'Charlie Freer', 'far and near', 'never fear', 'oh my dear', 'red steer', 'Crimea', and 'fusilier' but 'pig's ear' has always been the most popular.
The version 'in a pig's ear' is also perplexing. It originated in the USA in the 1850s as a variant of 'in a pig's eye'. Both phrases were used as expressions of incredulous disbelief and have the same meaning as ' tell it to the marines '. They may possibly be related to ' pigs might fly '. See this link for  more on 'in a pig's ear' .
'Make a pig's ear' is a mid 20th century phrase and means 'completely botch something up; make a complete mess of it'. This is first found in print in a 1950 edition of the Reader's Digest:
"If you make a pig's ear of the first one, you can try the other one."
The expression derives from the old proverb 'you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear', which dates from the 16th century. The English clergyman Stephen Gosson published the romantic story Ephemerides in 1579 and in it referred to people who were engaged in a hopeless task:
"Seekinge too make a silke purse of a Sowes eare."
'Make a pig's ear of' alludes to what might be the result if someone did try to make something from a sow's ear - not a silk purse but a complete mess.
A norange
Origin
In 1914, the Danish grammarian Otto Jespersen coined the term 'metanalysis'. That's rather a dry start to a piece on what is a lively and intriguing facet of the English language. To find out what prompted Jespersen to believe that we needed a new word, let's bring in a stage prop - the humble orange.
Many sources will tell you that oranges were originally called noranges and that 'a norange' migrated to being called 'an orange'. Well, like so much folk etymology, that's not true, but there is a germ of truth in it. There never has been a word 'norange' in English, although there very nearly was.
The climate in England doesn't qualify it as a specialist orange-growing area and the fruit were first imported there in the 14th century. Oranges originated in South-east Asia and when they arrived in Persia and Spain they were given the names 'narang' and 'naranja' respectively. As they got nearer to England, and hence nearer to requiring a name in English, they lost the 'n'. This on happened their journey through France, where they were known as 'pomme d'orenge'.
In English, the indefinite article may be 'a' or 'an', depending on whether it is followed by a word which starts with a consonant or a vowel. When the consonant is an 'n', we may run into the 'a norange'/'an orange' confusion. It was this displacement of a letter from one word to another that Jespersen took an interest in and named 'metanalysis'. Mediaeval words like 'a napperon', 'a nuncle' and 'a nadder' could easily be confused in everyday speech with 'an apron', 'an uncle' and 'an adder' - and they were. The earlier forms aren't now used.
The misaligning of word boundaries can go the other way too, with the 'n' being added rather than lost. The best-known examples of that are 'nickname' and 'newt', which were originally 'an eke-name' and 'an ewt'.
It's easy for us to see these examples now as obvious errors, but bear in mind that the changing of words based on confusion about where words start and end took place before dictionaries or even printing and reading were commonplace. When we come across new words now it is just as likely that we see them in print as to hear them spoken. If we had to rely on speech alone we might now be coining mutations like 'an erd' or 'a Niphone'.
What you see is what you get (wysiwyg)
Meaning
A computer screen display which appears on screen as it will be seen when printed on paper.
Origin
'Wysiwyg', pronounced 'whizzywig', is one of the best-known of all acronyms. It is generally supposed that the phrase 'what you see is what you get', the acronym 'wysiwyg' and the computer interface that they referred to emerged in close succession. This isn't the case; each of those elements has its own independent genesis.
Firstly, the phrase. 'What you see is what you get' is widely reported as being coined by Flip Wilson in performances as his drag character Geraldine in Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In in the late 1960s and then later on The Flip Wilson Show. Wilson certainly popularized the expression but it was already in general use before he adopted it as a catchphrase. A form of the phrase had been used by advertisers in the USA since at least the 1940s to indicate a straightforward, no-fuss form of trading. An advert for a Filmo Sportster camera in The Charleston Gazette came close to 'what you see is what you get' in November 1949:
You just sight, press a button and what you see, you get!
The precise phrase came into print some years later. For instance, this text from an advert for a house sale, in The Oakland Tribune, May 1966:
"So with the exception of landscaping and decorator furnishings, what you see is what you get."
Next comes the acronym 'wysiwyg'. This is generally thought to have been coined from the phrase and in reference to the graphical computer user interfaces that were emerging from Xerox PARC in the 1970s, but it isn't known who first used the acronym in that context. The first such reference that I can find comes surprisingly late, in Byte magazine, April 1982:
'What you see is what you get' (or WYSIWYG) refers to the situation in which the display screen portrays an accurate rendition of the printed page.
However, he first citation I have found of the acronym in print comes several years earlier in a non-computer related context. In January 1972, a student business competition was organised in Victoria, Texas and an account of it published in the local newspaper the Victoria Advocate on the 23rd January. Each team of students chose a name for the dummy businesses that they were going to manage. They were clearly encouraged to use acronyms, as the names they chose were:
SPOT - Selling Products of Tomorrow
LIFE - Lets Insure Future Existence
WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get
So, unless earlier computer related citations are found - which would that seem unlikely as the first wysiwyg software didn't emerge until after 1972 - the prize for coining 'wysiwyg' goes to a bunch of Texan high school kids, not to the boffins of Palo Alto.
'What you see is what you get' later came to be used in a general context, often by individuals - like Flip Wilson's Geraldine - to describe themselves. It is shorthand for 'I may be a plain-speaking rough diamond, but I have no hidden agenda - let my reputation precede me', in the same way that people used to say 'take me as you find me'. The British entrepreneur Sir Alan Sugar is known for such an attitude and used 'What You See Is What You Get' as the title of his autobiography.
Double dutch
Nonsense; gibberish - a language one cannot understand.
Origin
There are a host of phrases in English that include the word 'Dutch'; that's hardly surprising as The Netherlands is just a few miles across the sea from England. We don't have anything like as many expressions that include 'French', so why the interest in 'Dutch'? Two reasons: trade and war.
Both England and Holland (which is what most people call The Netherlands), have a vigorous and wide-ranging maritime trading tradition that dates back to the 16th century. England imported many commodities from Holland and gave them 'Dutch' names. The first of these imports was 'Dutch sauce', which we now call Hollandaise. Claudius Hollyband referred to this in the French Schoole Maister, 1573:
Will you eate of a Pike with a high dutche sauce?
Many other examples followed:
Dutch cheese - first used in 1700.
Dutch barn - 1742.
Dutch hoe - 1742.
Dutch oven - 1769.
The Anglo-Dutch wars of the 17th and 18th centuries were acrimonious even by the usual standards of war. Following the conflicts the English came to hold the Dutch in very low regard and as a consequence there are numerous English phrases which portray them in an unflattering light, often as skinflints or drunkards. The common strand in all of these disparaging 'Dutch' expressions is that anything Dutch is the opposite of what it ought to be. Examples of these expressions are:
Dutch bargain - a bargain made when one is debilitated by drink - first recorded in 1654.
Dutch defence - a legal defence in which the defendant seeks clemency by deceitfully betraying others - 1749.
Dutch comfort - cold comfort; only good because things could have been worse - 1796.
Dutch metal/Dutch gold - a cheap alloy resembling gold - 1825.
Dutch courage - brash bravery induced by drink - 1826.
Dutch treat - no treat as such; each person pays for their own expenses - 1887.
Added to that list is 'double Dutch'. The Anglo-Dutch wars were a very long time ago and we are all friends now, but at this point we can introduce another reason for the English to have held on so long to hostile stereotyping of the Dutch, that is, the link with the UK's 20th century military rivals, the Germans. 'Dutch' was originally the generic name for both Germans and, as they were formally called, Hollanders. High Dutch was the language of southern Germany and Low Dutch the language of The Netherlands.
Double Dutch is in fact a synonym for High Dutch and as such is a slur on the Germans rather than the Dutch, although the distinction may not have been apparent to the average 18th century English sailor. Charles Dibdin was the first to allude to the incomprehensibility of the language, in Collected Songs, 1790:
Why, I heard our good chaplain palaver one day,
About souls, heaven, mercy and such;
And, my timbers! what lingo he'd coil and belay,-
Why, 'twas just all as one as High Dutch.
The earliest example of 'double Dutch' that I have found is in John Davis' Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America, 1803, in which the author spoke to a colleague in Welsh:
"Mr Adams - What devil language is that? Is it double Dutch coiled against the sun?"
The coiling that was referred to in both the above citations was the winding of rope. Sailors called anti-clockwise winding 'coiling against the sun'. This was generally disparaged and an indication that 'double Dutch' was the linguistic equivalent of a badly coiled rope. Most of the early citations of 'double Dutch' are in their full form 'double Dutch coiled against the sun'. We can safely assume that what was meant by 'double Dutch' was 'Dutch that is malformed and twisted' rather than 'Dutch, twice over'.
'Jack' phrases
The origin of the many phrases that contain the name JackIf it is true, as I'm sure it is, that the phrases in a language define a culture's interests and preoccupations then the English-speaking world must be fascinated by people. English phrases frequently include names. Some of these refer to actual individuals, for example, ' Gordon Bennett! ', ' Sweet Fanny Adams ' and the numerous people referred to in  Cockney rhyming slang , but more often than not the person referred to is imaginary. Examples of phrases that include invented names are ' the life of Riley ', ' heavens to Betsy ' and ' moaning Minnie '.
Jack appears in more phrases than does any other name. That might be expected as Jack is a colloquial form of John and, for the period in which the majority of these phrases were coined, John was the most common boy's name amongst English speakers. Jack was the generic name for the common man; a lad, a fellow, a chap, but also with the hint of knave or likeable rogue. 'John' appears in our phrases and sayings hardly at all and this is probably because 'Jack' was considered the more interesting character. The use of 'Jack' with the meaning of 'young rogue' dates back to the 16th century and examples are known from Nicholas Udall and others in Middle English. An early example in a form of English that is easily accessible to us now is found in Shakespeare's Taming of Shrew, circa 1616:
A mad-cap ruffian and a swearing Jacke.
Some well-known linguistic Jacks are:
- Jack the Lad - a self-assured young man who is a bit of a rogue. This is the archetypal Jack; young, roguish and male.  See more about Jack the Lad...
- Jack Tar - sailors coated their clothes and the ropes of their ships to make them weatherproof. They even smeared their hair and beards to avoid stray wisps getting caught in the rigging. What better name for sailors than Jack Tar?
- Jack of all trades - the common man, who will turn his hand to any form of work.  See more about Jack of all trades...
- Jack Robinson - in the phrase 'Before you can say Jack Robinson'. Possibly a rare example of a Jack that was a real person.  See more about Jack Robinson...
- All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy - this proverbial expression has been known since 1670.
Jack was the name given to many of the sprites, imps and supernatural creatures that were imagined to have human form, for example, Jack Frost (an imp that nips our ears and toes with cold), Jack o' lantern (a fairy that lives in hedges), Jack-in-irons (a malevolent giant).
Jacks, being typically young and mischievous, feature strongly in nursery rhymes, for example, Little Jack Horner, Jack Sprat and Jack and Jill. The latter two of these pre-date their appearance in nursery rhyme. Jack Sprat was the name given to any dwarf from the 16th century onward and Jack and Jill was used as the name of any young couple as early as the 1450s.
Cockney Rhyming Slang  has an association with roguish street trading and is another linguistic area where Jacks flourish. Examples are: Jack Palancing (dancing), On your Jack (Jones > alone), Jack-in-the box (pox), Jack Randle (candle).
I've not listed every man Jack as there are so many - the OED includes over hundred of them. Time to jack it in I think.
Pony up
Pay money, especially a payment that is in arrears.
Origin
'Pony up' is very much an American phrase and most people in the USA will know its meaning, whereas elsewhere in the English-speaking world the expression is rarely used. In the UK we are more likely to 'stump up' and in Australia and New Zealand money is 'fronted up'. So what have ponies got to do with paying money?
A pony is of course a small horse and that meaning has been in use since the mid-1600s. The word has several other slang meanings, including:
- A small measure of alcohol (British, first documented in 1708)
- A short crib sheet or study aid (American, 1827)
- Twenty-five pounds (British slang, 1797)
- An abridged news report (American, 1877) 
In the 1950s, 'pony' was also adopted as  Cockney Rhyming Slang  for 'rubbish; nonsense'. The full version of the rhyme is ' pony and trap ' - and I'll leave it to you to figure out what 'trap' rhymes with.
The first use of 'pony up' in print that I can find is in the Connecticut publication The Rural Magazine, May 1819:
The afternoon, before the evening, the favoured gentlemen are walking rapidly into the merchant-tailors shops, and very slowly out, unless they ponied up the Spanish [the money].
It is most likely that the expression was coined in the USA, but a claim can also be made for a British origin. 'Pony up' was recorded in the UK in the 19th century, in Thomas Darlington's glossary Folk-speech of South Cheshire, 1887:
Pony, to pay. To 'pony out' = 'stump out'; a slang term.
Clearly, that is later than the American first usage, but how long it had been in vernacular use in England before Darlington recorded it is difficult to say. It is unlikely that the term migrated to Cheshire from the USA; migrations, of people and of language, were largely in the other direction at that date.
Whatever the location of the first use, it is clear from the 'pay money' meaning of 'pony up' that the pony in question is some form of currency or donation. The British 'twenty five pounds' meaning is a possibility, but seems rather too specific an amount; after all we can 'pony up' any amount. In fact, none of the numerous meanings of 'pony' appear to fit the bill and it may be that we are backing the wrong horse.
Enter stage right, a dark horse of another colour. The English quarter day of March 25th was the day that debts were settled and payments were made. The first two words of the fifth division of Psalm 119, which was always sung at Matins on the 25th day of the month, are 'Legem pone'. The term became associated with the payment of debts and was used as an allusive expression for 'payment of money; cash down'. That meaning of 'legem pone' was recorded as early as 1570 by Thomas Tusser in Hundreth Good Pointes Husbandry:
Use Legem pone to pay at thy day,
Was that the source of the term 'pony up' and should we really be spelling it 'pone up'? Well, we don't know for certain but, in a two-horse race, it seems a better place for your money than the eponymous pony.
Fathom out
To ascertain something; to deduce from the  facts.
Origin
A fathom is one of those units of linear measurement that we learned  at school (at least we did when I was at an English grammar school in the 14th  century) and now can't quite remember just what length they refer to. There's  the furlong (a 'furrow long', or the length of a mediaeval field - about 220  yards), the rod or pole or perch (all the same measurement - of five paces), the  cubit (from the elbow to the fingertips). These peculiarly named units are  matched in their imprecision by the fathom, which is the span encompassed by the  outstretched arms from fingertip to fingertip - about six feet. Naturally, not  everyone's arms were the same length and so the fathom wasn't an agreed  distance. The woolliness over the definition of the term is illustrated in  Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia, 1728:
There are three kinds of Fathoms. The first,    which is that of Men of War, contains six Feet: The middling, or that of    Merchant Ships, five Feet, and a half; and the small one, used in Fluyts,    Flyboats, and other Fishing-vessels, only five Feet.
When we say that we fathom something now we  mean that we grasp or understand it. In the Middle Ages to fathom something was,  in keeping with the literal 'fingertip to fingertip' meaning of the word, to  encircle it with the arms. From the 14th century onward, people who embraced  each other were said to be fathoming. That meaning has now fallen out of use,  which at least spares us from daily 'fathom and tell' stories in our tabloid  newspapers.
'Fathoming out' refers to measuring by using  the outstretched arms, a usage that dates back to at least the 16th century; for  example, this piece from Richard Eden's The Decades of the Newe  Worlde, 1555:
Seuen men... with theyr armes streached    furthe were scarsely able too fathame them [trees]  aboute.
As time went by 'to fathom' began to mean 'to  get to the bottom of' or 'to take soundings about'. This probably derives from  the most commonly believed derivation of 'fathoming out', which is the measuring  of the depth of water beneath a ship by use of a weight fixed to a rope marked  out in fathoms. This ' sounding out ' was known both literally and  figuratively by the early 17th century; for example, this literal usage,  recorded in Sir William Brereton's Travels in Holland,  1634:
Fathoming the depth of the water over against    Brill, we found it there where the buoys are placed to warn all seamen of the    danger of that passage, that we had not above two feet more water than the    ship drew.
Philip Massinger's comic play A New Way to Pay Old Debts,  1633, makes a figurative use of 'fathoming', that is, a usage that makes no  explicit reference to distance but which moves the meaning of 'fathoming' from  'getting the measure of' to 'understanding':
The Statesman beleeues he fathomes The    counsels of all Kingdomes on the earth.
Fathoms are so strongly associated with  seafaring that it seems unecessary to look any further than the nautical  measurement as the source of 'fathom out', especially as this form of measuring  was still commonplace when the term was coined.
If the shoe fits, wear it
Meaning
If a description applies to you, then accept  it.
This expression is often used when something  derogatory is said about a person who then complains to a third party. The third  party, if they agree with the original negative comment, might suggest "If the  shoe fits, then wear it". An example of that might be:
Jack: Just because I've missed two or three    sessions, my fitness trainer says I lack motivation.
Jill: Well, if the    shoe fits, wear it. 
Origin
'If the shoe fits, wear it' is often shortened  to 'If the shoe fits...', leaving the listener to fill in the blank. The  expression is the American version of the earlier British phrase 'If the cap  fits, wear it', which is also still in general use. Daniel Defoe used the  earlier phrase in the satirical poem The Dyet of Poland. Defoe had  the work printed in London in 1705 but, as it was a rather vehement critique of  the English parliament, Defoe used the flimsy pretence that it had been printed  in Dantzig and was the work of 'Angliopoloski of Lithuania'. Defoe's point in  the poem was that readers are responsible for their own opinions; he (or rather  Angliopoloski) may have written the poem but that any conclusions drawn from it  were owned by the reader, not him:
Gentlemen, and if the Cap fits any Body let    'em wear it.
'If the cap fits' is itself a version of a yet  earlier phrase 'if the cloak sitteth fit', that is, 'if the cloak fits well'.  This expression dates from the 16th century and was used in print by Richard  Hooker in Of the Lawes of  Ecclesiasticall Politie, 1593:
Which cloake sitteth no lesse fit on the    backe of their cause, then of the Anabaptists.
The 'cloak' version of the phrase does suggest  that the later 'cap' was a variant of 'cape'.
As to 'if the shoe fits', that began being used  in the late 18th century. The earliest example that I have found in print is  from the US newspaper the New  York Gazette & Weekly Mercury, May 1773:
Why should Mr. Vanderbeck apply a general    comparison to himself? Let those whom the shoe fits wear  it.
The change from cap to shoe may well have been  influenced by the Cinderella story, which has a snug-fitting slipper as the  primary plot device. Versions of the tale that include the 'lost slipper'  scenario were well known in the USA and Europe by 1773. In 1634, Giambattista  Basile, published Il  Pentamerone, a popular collection of Italian folk tales. One of the  stories, Cenerentola, is  the basis of the Cinderella story as we now know it, complete with wicked  stepmother, ugly sisters and a missing slipper.
Many expressions, for example, ' toe the  line ', ' get off your high horse ' etc., were first used  literally and their metaphorical meaning came later. 'If the shoe fits' is a  rarity in that it has gone the other way - having been used for centuries in a  figurative sense, its most common usage now is in shoe shop advertising  slogans.
Bunny boiler
An obsessive and dangerous female, in pursuit  of a lover who has spurned her.
Origin
The expression 'bunny boiler' derives from the 1987 film Fatal Attraction, written by  James Dearden and Nicholas Meyer. The plot centres around Alex Forrest (Glenn  Close) obsessively pursuing her ex-lover Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas). The  phrase comes from the plot device whereby Forrest, in a fit of frenzied  jealousy, boils her erstwhile lover's daughter's pet rabbit. Gallagher's  suspicions should have become aroused earlier, when Forrest was trying to  persuade him to meet her, when she said "Bring the dog, I love animals... I'm a  great cook."
At the time that the phrase first came into  general use it referred to someone unable to remain rational at the end of a  romantic relationship. Very quickly that usage became moderated and it came to  be used, often with some degree of irony, in much less extreme situations. Any  needy, possessive or even just mildly annoying woman is now liable to be  described as a 'bunny boiler'.
The phrase is the modern equivalent of the  woman referred to in the expression ' Hell has no  fury like a woman scorned ' which, in the competition for  'best-known phrases attributed to Shakespeare that were actually by someone  else', runs ' music has  charms to soothe the savage breast ' into a close second  place. Both these phrases were coined by William Congreve in 1697, in the  play The Mourning Bride.  For reasons that I'll leave others to explain, it is only women who are thought  to become unhinged by being what is now graphically known as 'being dumped'.  There's no male equivalent of 'a women scorned' or a 'bunny boiler'.
As 'bunny boiler' is a recent phrase with such  a clear source we are able to trace how it has found its way into popular use.  It wasn't directly from the film, as the epithet isn't used in the dialogue, nor  any of the advertising blurb used to promote it. As to who coined it, that's not  clear, although it may well have been Glenn Close. The first use of it in print  is from an interview Close gave to the US magazine the Ladies' Home Journal, reported  in the Dallas Morning  News on 6th December  1990:
"There's nothing like portraying a    psychopathic bunny-boiler to boost one's self-esteem, Glenn Close tells    Ladies' Home Journal."
Popular phrases that have found their way into  the language since the emergence of the Internet appear first in online  discussion groups, blogs and online newspapers. The earliest large archive of  online colloquial messages is that of USENET groups, but Bunny boiler isn't found there until 1994, nor does  it appear more than once or twice in the archives of US or British newspapers  before that date.
If the phrase were a commercial product then  marketing people would say that it reached its target audience in 1994. It  certainly saw a sudden and widespread use from then onwards and is now a  commonly used phrase. Fatal  Attraction was released in  1987 and Close referred to the phrase in 1990. Newly coined terms appear to  spread in the community like viruses and, like flu viruses, they float around in  the populace until they reach a threshold of infected cases, above which they  spread rapidly. It appears that 'bunny boiler' got to that point sometime in  1994.
May you live in interesting times
Meaning
May you experience much disorder and trouble in  your life.
Origin
While purporting to be a blessing, this is in  fact a curse. The expression is always used ironically, with the clear  implication that 'uninteresting times', of peace and tranquillity, are more  life-enhancing than interesting ones.
'May  you live in interesting times' is widely reported as being of ancient Chinese  origin but is neither Chinese nor ancient, being recent and western. It  certainly seems to have been intended to sound oriental, in the faux-Chinese  'Confucius he say' style, but that's as near to China as it actually  gets. Confucius's actual sayings are as elusive as those of his western  counterpart Aesop - we have no written records from  either of them.
The phrase was introduced in the 20th century  in the form 'interesting age' rather than 'interesting times' and appears that  way in the opening remarks made by Frederic R. Coudert at the Proceedings of the Academy of  Political Science, 1939,
Some years ago, in 1936, I had to write to a    very dear and honored friend of mine, who has since died, Sir Austen    Chamberlain, brother of the present Prime Minister, and I concluded my letter    with a rather banal remark, "that we were living in an interesting age."    Evidently he read the whole letter, because by return mail he wrote to me and    concluded as follows: "Many years ago, I learned from one of our diplomats in    China that one of the principal Chinese curses heaped upon an enemy is, 'May    you live in an interesting age.'" "Surely", he said, "no age has been more    fraught with insecurity than our own present time." That was three years    ago.
This citation has to be treated with caution as  Chamberlain didn't speak Chinese and never visited China, although he was in  contact with diplomats stationed there during his time as British Foreign  Secretary, that is, 1924-1929. We have the 1939 citation in print, so the  'interesting age' form must be at least that old. If we are to believe Coulson's  assertion, the phrase dates from before 1936 and, if we trust in Chamberlain's  recollection, we can push the origin back to pre-1929.
As to the currently used 'interesting times'  version, we can only date that to post WWII. In a speech to the 2nd session of  the US Congress in August 1946, Senator Robert Byrd addressed a remark to Harry  S. Truman:
Mr. President, there is an old Chinese curse    that says, 'May you live in interesting times.'
Most generations think their times are  especially troubling - now as ever. Senator Byrd probably had a better reason  than many to call 1940s USA 'interesting', as it was less than a year after the  US's use of atomic bombs and the surrender of Japan and Germany in WWII and only  a month or two after Winston Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' speech, made in Fulton,  Missouri, warning of the rise of Soviet power.
I hope you found that  interesting.
For good measure
As an additional extra.
Origin
'Good measure' has been part of the language  since the first English-speaking 'purveyor of fyne goodes' set up shop, and it  just means 'an ample or generous quantity of that which is sold by  measure'.
The first instance of the expression in print  is found where many other first coinages originated, in John Wyclif's Middle  English translation of the Bible, circa 1384, in Luke 6:38:
Thei schulen yyue in to youre bosum a good    mesure, and wel fillid, and schakun togidir, and ouerflowynge; for bi the same    mesure, bi whiche ye meeten, it schal be metun ayen to you.
[They shall    give into your bosom a good measure, and well-filled, and shaken together, and    overflowing; for by the same measure, by which ye mete, it shall be meted    again to you.]
We might expect the extended term 'in good  measure' to refer to an abundance of something. In fact, its rather the reverse.  'Measured' also means 'moderate; restrained' and if a person acts 'in good  measure' they are being especially temperate in their actions. As it happens,  Wyclif was also one of the first to put that meaning of 'good measure' into  print, in a collection of sermons known as Controversial Tracks, circa  1400, which was directed at the clergy:
Ye shulden lyue on ye puple in good mesure as    Paul biddin.
[You be sustained by the people in moderation, as St. Paul    bids you.]
It wasn't until much later that the use of the  phrase 'good measure' returned to its original 'ample' meaning. In the 19th  century people began to express the idea of things being 'thrown in for good  measure', that is, added as a complimentary extra portion. In 1811, the British  mathematician Patrick Kelly wrote The Universal Cambist, which  was an exhaustive study of the weights and measures in use in different parts of  the world and a method of converting from one to another. In the notes on  Swedish measurement he included:
Corn, and other dry commodities, are measured    by Tunnor. The Tunne is divided into 32 Kappar. But to every Tunna of wheat 4    Kappar are allowed for good measure.
Before long, the expression 'for good measure'  began to be used figuratively, that is, in circumstances where no actual  measurement was taking place. An example appears in the May 1850 edition of the  American magazineLittell's Living Age, in a report of a public flogging  in California:
'Give him another for good measure' - 'Hit    him again' - were the sounds which greeted his ears.
'For good measure' might appear to be linked to  the ' Baker's dozen ', as both phrases express the  notion of a little extra being added above the absolute requirement. In fact,  the two phrases aren't connected, 'Baker's dozen' being much older. While the  extra that was added 'for good measure' was added willingly, the extra that made  up a Baker's dozen was added under threat of severe punishment. In mediaeval  England, being light in the loaves was as risky as being 'light in the loafers'  was prior to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the 1967 Sexual Offences  Act.
Like it or lump it
Meaning
Said of an unpleasant outcome that one has no  choice but to accept - one can either endure it willingly or endure it with  suffering.
Origin
When we are given a  fait  accompli  in a situation in which we would  normally expect some sort of choice, we might not be too pleased about it. We  may then be told to 'like it or lump it'. Had the expression been coined in the  16th century this is no doubt what Thomas Hobson would have said to his  prospective customers when he offered them ' Hobson's choice '.
But how exactly do we 'lump' something?  Although 'lump' is almost always used as a noun rather than a verb, there are  many meanings of the verb form of 'lump' to choose from:
- To bet all of one's money on a single wager    (first recorded in the 19th century)
- To make something into a lump (18th    century)
- To classify various things as a group, i.e. lump them together    (17th century)
- To slouch along lazily (17th century)
- To look sulky    or disagreeable (16th century)
Of course, it is the last of these lumps that  is the alternative to 'like it'.
'Lumping' in the sense of mooching about  grumpily may well be of Irish origin and is first recorded in Richard  Stanyhurst's Treatise  Describing Irelande, 1577. The Dublin born Stanyhurst risked the wrath of  his contemporaries by suggesting that the English rule in Ireland wasn't the  source of all their troubles:
Here percase some snappish carper will    snuffinglie snib me for debasing the Irish language: because that by proofe    and experience we see, that the pale was neuer in more florishing estate than    when it was wholie English, and neuer in woorsse plight than since it hath    infranchised the Irish. But some will saie, that I shew my selfe herein as    friuolous... They stand lumping and lowring, fretting and fuming.
[Note: Stanyhurst's expressive phrase    'snuffingly snib' means 'rebuke in a snorting manner'.]
[Note: see also ' Beyond the    pale '.]
Soon afterwards, in 1581, Barnaby Rich used the  term in Farewell to Military  Profession:
She beganne to froune, lumpe, and lowre at    her housebande.
Rich was a naval captain and undoubtedly  English, but most of his writing related to Ireland and he moved to Dublin to  write on his retirement from the Navy.
People had been lumping it for a few hundred  years before anyone thought of the phrase 'like it or lump it'. A play on words  between the noun and verb usages of the word lump was what brought it about. The  early uses of the expression refer to things that have lumps in them, as in this  example from the London magazine The Monthly Mirror, 1807, in a  piece titled Rules For  Punning:
Mrs. ...purposely sends a dish of tea to a    lady, without sugar, of which she complains.
Mr. ...(Handing the sugar    basin) - Well, ma'am, if you don't like it, you may lump  it.
The English love of wordplay is long lasting,  some might say chronic, and Zadie Smith made the same little joke in her  novel White Teeth,  2000:
We're all English now, mate. Like it or lump    it, as the rhubarb said to the custard.
The first example that I can find of the  precise 'like it or lump it' wording of the expression is in Specimens, 1841, Josiah  Shippey's book of morally uplifting essays, which were delivered in the form of  tortured rhyming couplets, worthy of William McGonagall:
Yet his merit, though some may be ignorant of    it,
And as he by it wishes each one may profit;
Imperiously forces, or    like it or lump it,
Himself, honest fellow, to blow his own    trumpet.
Blood, sweat and tears
Hard work and effort in difficult  circumstances.
Origin
The expression 'blood, sweat and tears' is  usually said to have been coined by Sir Winston Churchill in his famous  " I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat " speech in 1940, when he warned the British people of the hardships to  come in fighting WWII. Each country seems to have a shortlist of people to whom  they attribute colourful quotations that lack an accredited author. In the USA  the sage of choice is Mark Twain; in Ireland, Oscar Wilde and in England,  Winston Churchill. However, it wasn't Churchill who coined 'blood, sweat and  tears' - ultimately it is has a biblical source.
The first occurrence of the expression that I  can find in print is in Sermons on Various  Subjects by Christmas Evans,  translated from the Welsh by J. Davis, 1837:
Christ the High Priest of our profession,    when he laid down his life for us on Calvary, was bathed in his    own blood, sweat and tears. 
Evans, a.k.a. 'The John Bunyan of Wales' (25  December 1766 - 1838) was an eccentric but widely admired preacher. We can't now  be sure if it was he who coined the phrase or his translator. Either way, we can  be sure that the phrase was in the language by 1837.
Christmas Evans knew the Bible by heart and was  no doubt influenced in his choice of words by this passage from  The King James Bible , Luke  22:44:
And being in an agony he prayed more    earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to    the ground.
Churchill, although no great theological  scholar, borrowed 'blood, sweat and tears' for his famous wartime speech and can  certainly take the credit for the popular take-up of the phrase into everyday  language.
Al Cooper picked up on the phrase as the name for his new jazz-rock  band in 1967. Cooper could hardly have known how apt a choice it was. The band  has gone through more disagreements, sackings and changes of direction than  most, with at least 140 musicians having been members at some point.
Many of the things Churchill is supposed to  have said are wrongly attributed. One of the better ones that can be verified is  his exchange with the socialite and politician Nancy Astor:
Astor: Winston, if I were your wife    I would put poison in your coffee!
Churchill: And if I were your    husband I would drink it.
My favourite Churchillism is a supposed reply  to an unwelcome letter that has all the hallmarks of the man's work but is  probably apocryphal:
"Dear Sir, I am in the smallest room in the    house and your letter is before me. Very soon it will be behind  me."
Loose cannon
Meaning
An unpredictable person or thing, liable to  cause damage if not kept in check by others.
Origin
Between the 17th and 19th centuries wooden warships carried  cannon as their primary offensive weapons. In order to avoid damage from their  enormous recoil when fired they were mounted on rollers and secured with rope. A  loose cannon was just what it sounds like, that is, a cannon that had become  free of its restraints and was rolling dangerously about the deck.
As with many nautical phrases, the use of  'loose cannon' owes something to the imagination as no evidence has come to  light to indicate that the phrase was used by sailors in the days that ships  actually carried cannon. The imagination in question belonged to Victor Hugo who  set the scene in the novel Ninety Three, 1874. A  translation of the French original describes cannon being tossed about following  a violent incident onboard ship:
"The carronade, hurled forward by the    pitching, dashed into this knot of men, and crushed four at the first blow;    then, flung back and shot out anew by the rolling, it cut in two a fifth poor    fellow... The enormous cannon was left alone. She was given up to herself. She    was her own mistress, and mistress of the vessel. She could do what she willed    with both."
Henry Kingsley picked up this reference in his  novel Number Seventeen,  1875, in which he made the first use of the term 'loose cannon' in  English:
"At once, of course, the ship was in the    trough of the sea, a more fearfully dangerous engine of destruction than Mr.    Victor Hugo’s celebrated loose cannon."
The earliest figurative use of 'loose cannon'  in print that I can find is from The Galveston Daily News,  December 1889:
The negro vote in the south is a unit now    mainly because it is opposed by the combined white vote. It would in no event    become, as Mr. Grady once said, "a loose cannon in a storm-tossed    ship."
The phrase might have dwindled into obscurity  in the 20th century but for the intervention of the US president Theodore  Roosevelt. William White was a noted US journalist and politician around the  turn of the 20th century and was a close friend of Roosevelt. White's Autobiography, published soon  after his death in 1944 contained the following reminiscence:
He [Roosevelt] said: "I don't want    to be the old cannon loose on the deck in the storm".
As I suggested, nautical terms are rife with  romanticism and another term in which items are imagined to be rolling about the  deck of a sailing ship (incorrectly in this case) is ' cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey '.
In the sticks
In the country; especially the unsophisticated  backwoods.
Origin
'Stick' is one of the older words in English.  It dates from around the 10th century and was first put into print in Old English Leechdoms, 1150,  with the meaning of 'a slender branch or twig of a tree when cut or broken  off':
grennne sticcan hæslenne [freshly cut    hazel twigs]
In the following thousand years, all manner of  thin pointed objects have been called sticks - ships' masts, conductors' batons,  cricket stumps, cigarettes, violin bows, French loaves, and so on. As befits  such commonplace objects, sticks have made their way into many phrases - 'over  the sticks' (horse racing over fences), 'between the sticks' (football  goalposts), 'up sticks' (move one's tent'), 'sticks and stones may break my  bones' and so on.
'In the sticks' is just a reference to an area  where there are lots of twigs, i.e. the countryside. It was first an American  expression but is now used throughout the English-speaking world. The earliest  citation of it that I have found is from the US newspaper the Florence Times Daily, November  1897:
... he gathered from 1 1/2 acres this year 21    barrels of corn. If any man "away in the sticks" can beat this, in the    language of "Philander Doesticks," we exclaim, "let him stand forward to de    rear."
For a time, the phrase became specifically  associated with baseball. 'The sticks' were exhibition games, played in county  locations, which baseball players organised to supplement their income outside  the main season. It was not allowed by the rules of the US Baseball Commission,  but the rules weren't often strictly applied. The practice was referred to in  the Daily Colonist,  October 1921:
"Judge Landis has not yet consigned Babe Ruth    to oblivion for playing in the sticks for exhibition  money."
The best known reference to 'the sticks' in any newspaper was the  'Sticks Nix Hick Pix' headline in Variety, 17th July 1935. This  was a famously succinct expression of the opinion that 'people in the backwoods  [sticks] aren't interested [nix] in films [pix] about rural [hick] issues'. Four  does seem to be just about the minimum number of words needed to express that  idea.
Forlorn hope
A hopeless or desperate enterprise.
Origin
Lack of hope must have been a commonplace  feeling amongst the English in the 19th century as they coined a variety of  phrases to express it - 'not a hope in Hell', 'some hopes', 'what a hope' etc.  To that list we might add 'forlorn hope'; but that would be an incorrect  addition as it turns out.
'Forlorn' derives from 'forlese', which just  means 'lose', so 'forlorn hope' just means 'lost hope', which is the way it was  understood in the 19th century, as it is now. That's not how it was in the 16th  century, when a forlorn hope wasn't a world-weary feeling but a robust and  gung-ho  band of soldiers.
Each troop in the British Army had a  hand-picked group of soldiers, chosen for their ferocity and indifference to  risk (and occasionally by using that tried and tested army method of "I want  three volunteers. That's you, you and you."). They were the army's 'attack dogs'  who risked all in reckless death or glory raids on the enemy.
The Anglo-Norman terms 'avant-garde' and  'reregard', were adopted into English as 'vanguard' and 'rearguard' in the 14th  century. They were the names of the forces that attacked from the front and  protected the rear respectively. It seems reasonable to expect a group called  the 'avant-garde' to be the first into battle but before them came the 'Forlorn  Hope'. These soldiers, also called the 'forlorn boys' or 'forlorn fellows', were  given little hope of survival by their peers. Lord Byron summed up the mind-set  of the troop in the epic poem The Siege of Corinth,  1816:
The foremost of the fierce assault.
The    bands are rank'd; the chosen van
Of Tartar and of Mussulman,
The full of    hope, misnamed "forlorn,"
Who hold the thought of death in  scorn,
The first mention of them in print is found in  Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles  of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, 1577:
Fortie or fiftie forlorne  boies.
Soon afterwards, the method of attack was  described in John Dymmok's A  Treatise of Ireland, circa 1600:
Before the vantguarde marched the forelorn    hope consisting of 40 shott and 20 shorte weapons, with order that they should    not discharge vntil they presented theire peeces to the rebel breasts in their    trenches, and that sooddenly the shorte weapons should enter the trenches pell    mell.
The choice of the name 'Forlorn Hope' for a  group of soldiers who had little chance of survival seems straightforward and  intuitive. Again, things aren't as they seem. The term was originally Dutch and  the equivalent combative groups in Holland were called the 'Verloren Hoop',  literally 'lost troop'. A bit of impromptu mistranslation amongst the British  military turned this into 'Forlorn Hope'. The British Navy went a step further  and their wildmen were known as the 'Flowing Hope'. Added to the 'Forlorn Hope'  was the 'Rearlorn Hope'. These performed the same task whenever the rearguard  was called on to retreat.
Although the original meaning of 'forlorn hope'  is largely lost to us now, it was still in use in 1920 when John Galsworthy  wrote in The Forsyte  Saga:
"And round Crum were still gathered a forlorn    hope of blue-bloods with a plutocratic following".
The figurative meaning of 'forlorn hope', which  describes someone in a hopeless plight but without any mention of warfare,  overlapped with the original meaning for some years. In 1768, in Narrative of Travels in  Patagonia, John Byron described the predicament of being forced to leave a  group of his colleagues behind to certain death on an inhospitable  island:
We saw them a little after, setting out upon    their forlorn hope, and helping one another over a hideous tract of    rocks.
As time progressed, a forlorn hope was thought  of as something one experienced rather than something one belonged to. The  'rearlorn hope' took no such linguistic journey and has stayed exclusively  within the army.
Abracadabra
An exclamation used by conjurors when  performing a trick.
Origin
When stage conjurors and magicians come to the  finale of a trick and exclaim 'Abracadabra!' the implication is that a  mysterious power is being summoned to perform the required magic. In our  information age, in which it is possible to look up how virtually any stunt is  staged, we don't take the claims of magical powers too seriously. That wasn't  the case when the word abracadabra was first in common use.
Mediaeval folk believed in magic as an everyday fact and any unusual  event that they couldn't explain was considered to be the result of some form of  enchantment. They used the incantation 'Abracadabra' to ward off such  bewitchment and as a remedy for poor health. The word was recited repeatedly,  each time with the final letter being removed, until just 'a' remained. It was  believed that the strength of the illness diminished as the word became shorter.  The charm was also written out on paper and worn in an amulet or sewn into  clothing.
No one is sure as to the origin of the strange  word 'abracadabra'. It is known to have been in use in 4th century Latin but  there are several theories that place the derivation before that,  including:
Roman sages, notably Serenus Sammonicus,    coined the word and devised the repeated word formula in the 2nd century    AD.
It being related to another magical word -    'abraxas'. In the Greek system of alphabetic numerology this word is    significant in that it contains letters that add up to 365, the number of days    in the year.
The word is of Hebrew or Aramaic origin,    being derived from the Hebrew words 'ab' (father), 'ben' (son), and 'ruach    acadosch' (holy spirit) or the Aramaic for 'demon'  respectively.
Sadly, none of these theories stands up to  close examination and actual documentary evidence is as insubstantial as those  fragments of mediaeval paper.
A reference in print to the use of the word in  English that dates back to 1582 is found in Eva Rimmington Taylor's The Troublesome Voyage of Capt.  Edward Fenton:
Banester sayth yt he healed 200 in one yer of    an ague by hanging abracadabra about their necks.
The belief in the power of the word lasted well  into the 18th century. In his Journal of the Plague Year, 1722,  Daniel Defoe was saddened by the continuing superstition of the populace when  faced with the threat of plague:
People deceiv'd; and this was in wearing    Charms, Philters, Exorcisms,  Amulets, and I know not what Preparations,    to fortify the Body with them against the Plague; as if the Plague was but a    kind of a Possession of an evil Spirit; and that it was to be kept off with    Crossings, Signs of the Zodiac, Papers tied up with so many Knots; and certain    Words, or Figures written on them, as particularly the Word Abracadabra,    form'd in Triangle, or Pyramid...
How the poor People found the Insufficiency    of those things, and how many of them were afterwards carried away in the    Dead-Carts. 
Over time, the belief in the power of  'abracadabra' receded and in the 19th century it came to mean 'fake magic'.  Terms like 'legal abracadabra' were used to denote the flummoxing of juries by  fast-talking lawyers. Stage conjurors then adopted it into their inventory of  the 'magic' words they used to punctuate their acts and the first known usage of  it in that context dates from 1819.
Some of these words, like ' hocus-pocus ' (1634), 'abraxas' (1569) and 'hey  presto' (1732) have a long history and a link to supernatural beliefs. Others,  like hey-presto's American form 'presto changeo' (1905) and 'shazam' (1940) are  pure stage patter.
Younger readers may be familiar with the 'killing curse' from the  Harry Potter books - 'avada kedavra', which appears to merge 'abracadabra' and  'cadaver'. UK residents of a certain age will always prefer the 'magic' spiel of  Sooty and Sweep's mentor Harry Corbett - 'Izzy, Wizzy, let's get  busy'
Between a rock and a hard place
Meaning
In difficulty, faced with a choice between two  unsatisfactory options.
Origin
This phrase originated in the USA in the early  part of the 20th century. It is the American manifestation of a phrase that  exists in several forms in other cultures.
The dilemma of being in a position where one is  faced with two equally unwelcome options appears to lie deep in the human  psyche. Language always reflects people's preoccupations and there are several  phrases that express this predicament. The first of these quite literally  conveys the uncomfortable nature of the choice between two lemmas  (propositions), i.e. 'on the horns of a dilemma'. Other phrases that compare two  less than desirable alternatives are 'the lesser of two evils', ' between the devil and the deep blue sea ',  'between Scylla and Charybdis', ' an offer you can't refuse ' and ' Hobson's choice '.
The earliest known printed citation of 'between  a rock and a hard place' is in the American Dialect Society's publication Dialect Notes V,  1921:
"To be between a rock and a hard place, ...to    be bankrupt. Common in Arizona in recent panics; sporadic in    California."
The 'recent panics' referred to in that citation are  undoubtedly the events surrounding the so-called US Bankers' Panic of 1907. This  financial crisis was especially damaging to the mining and railroad industries  of the western states.
In 1917, the lack of funding precipitated by  the earlier banking crisis led to a dispute between copper mining companies and  mineworkers in Bisbee, Arizona. The workers, some of whom had organized in  labour unions, approached the company management with a list of demands for  better pay and conditions. These were refused and subsequently many workers at  the Bisbee mines were forcibly deported to New Mexico.
It's tempting to surmise, given that the  mineworkers were faced with a choice between harsh and underpaid work at the  rock-face on the one hand and unemployment and poverty on the other, that this  is the source of the phrase. The phrase began to be used frequently in US  newspapers in the late 1930s, often with the alternative wording 'between a rock  and a hard spot'.
A more recent example of the use of the  expression, and one for which it seems gruesomely apt, is recounted in the 2010  film 127 Hours, which is  based on Aron Ralston's book Between a Rock and a Hard  Place. The memoir recounts the 127 hours that Ralston spent alone and  trapped by a boulder in Robbers Roost, Utah, after a climbing accident in April  2003, eventually opting for the 'hard place' of freeing himself by cutting off  part of his right arm.
Booby prize
A prize given to make fun of the loser in a  contest or game.
Origin
A Booby is a type of gannet. 'Boobies' has also  been used as a slang term for breasts since around 1935. This booby is neither  of those. The word has been used to mean dunce or nincompoop since at least the  late 16th century and that's the 'booby' of 'booby prize' and ' booby  trap '. The word probably derives from the Spanish word  'bobo' meaning 'fool' or 'dunce'. An example of that usage, as 'bobie', comes  in The Pleasant Comodie of  Patient Grissill, 1599:
Let Gwenthyan see what bobie fool loves    her...
It is also found, as 'booby', in Fletcher and  Massinger's comic play The  Custome of the Countrey, circa 1640:
Cry you great booby.
Some etymological records have it that people were labelled as  boobies because they were like the seemingly dim-witted seabirds. Actually, it  was the other way about. The blue-footed avians were named boobies by the 17th  century sailors who first came across them in the eastern Pacific because they  didn't attempt to escape when approached. Thomas Herbert recorded this  apparently stupid and 'booby-like' behaviour in the travelogue Relation Travails,  1634:
One of the Saylers espying a Bird fitly    called a Booby, hee mounted to the top-mast and tooke her. The foolish quality    of which Bird is to sit still, not valuing danger.
The phrase 'booby prize' originated as a term  of disparagement for the person with the lowest score in a contest. It was  probably coined in the USA. All the early printed references to 'booby prize'  originate from there - the earliest that I can find is from a student newspaper  from Oberlin, Ohio, The  Oberlin Review, 1881:
The gentlemen strove at skill in hemming    aprons for the fair ones: the first prize was won by Mr. Jackson, the booby    prize by Mr. Jones.
Fair to middling
Slightly above average.
Origin
'Fair to middling' comes to the party with two  friends, fair to  middlin' and fair to midland. Both of these  gatecrashers derive from the original phrase, but in different ways. Fair to middlin' is just a colloquial version written in  the way that the expression is often spoken, in mid-west America at least,  which, as we will see, is where the expression originated.
Fair to midland is an odder fish and comes from the  mispronunciation of 'middling' as 'midland'. The question is, why would anyone  do that? It could be just a simple mistake, although that seems unlikely as  'fair to midland' doesn't really mean anything. More likely is that it was the  result of a deliberate jokey mispronunciation, along the lines of  san fairy  Ann ,  taking the  Miguel  etc. This could have originated in the  English Midlands. It is widely used there and the English are inveterate  'accidentally on purpose' mispronouncers -  Cockney Rhyming Slang  is an entire dialect built along those  lines. In the case of 'fair to midland', the origin is more likely to be the  USA, specifically Texas, the reference being to that state's city of Midland.  The earliest printed citation of 'fair to midland' that I can find comes  from The New York Times,  May 1935:
Dr. William Tweddell, who is what might be    called a fair-to-Midland golfer...
The current usage of the expression is  predominantly American and has been boosted by the popularity of the US hard  rock band that has adopted it as its name.
As to the original version of the phrase 'fair  to middling', that is also of American origin. 'Middling' was and is a term used  by farmers to describe the quality of farm produce, especially sheep. There were  several loosely defined grades of produce: 'good', 'fair, 'middling', 'ordinary'  and 'poor'.
'Middling' is an old Scots word and has been in  use since at least the 15th century with the same meaning as now, that is, 'of  medium or moderate size, strength, quality'. In around 1450, the Marquis of Bute  wrote the Dictionary of the  Older Scottish Tongue, which includes what appears to be the earliest  example of 'middling' in print:
'The ynch sulde be with the thoum off midling    mane nother our mikil nor our litil bot be tuyx the  twa'.
I interpret that Old Scots text as meaning  'The inch should be measured with the thumb near the middle, neither at the  largest point nor the smallest but between the two' but, if there are any  old Scots out there who know better, I would be happy to be  enlightened.
'Fair' was used in the UK from the 18th century  onward to describe farm produce. An example of that usage is found in John  Mortimer's farming handbook The Whole Art of Husbandry,  1707:
As you gather your Fruit, separate the    fairest and biggest from the middling.
These farming terms travelled to America with  the early Scottish and English settlers. Like sailors who, when they needed  finer designations of direction than North, East South and West, came up with  South-west, North-east etc., farmers needed a name for 'not quite fair but  better than average' and they opted for 'fair to middling'. The earliest uses of  the expression all come from the USA, as does this example from an 1829 edition  of John Stuart Skinner's farming journal The American  Farmer:
Two or three lots of good wethers    [castrated rams] brought from $2.50 a 3 per head, and a few lots of    fair to middling, $1.50 a 2.
Farmers didn't stop there and came up with  other intermediate grades, like 'good fair'. Needing finer and finer  classifications of quality, they again followed the sailors' lead and copied  their 'North-north-east' style. In 1873, Beeton's Dictionary of  Commerce described a delivery  of cotton as:
Good fair to good saw-ginned Surat    cotton.
Bean counter
Meaning
A disparaging term for an accountant, or anyone  who one who is excessively concerned with statistical records or  accounts.
Origin
When researching the expression 'bean counter' there is a  difficulty - the term has several different meanings. The common usage these  days is as a name for a rather pedantic accountant, the implication being that,  while most of us are content to buy beans by the bag, fussy accountants want to  know exactly how many they are paying for. Before the first hapless accountant  was called a 'bean counter', the phrase was also used as the name of a place  where beans were sold, especially in the USA where 'pork and bean counters' were  commonplace in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Added to that, our inventive  predecessors used machines to count beans - and there's no need to tell you what  they called them. This variability can lead to some confusion when scanning old  newspaper records and other references. Nevertheless, I'll plough on and try to  sort the leguminosae from the chaff.
Bean counters, that is, 'counters where beans  were sold', came first. The US newspaper the Lewiston Evening Journal referred to these in June  1907:
The Clerk, seeing himself worsted by    numbers... walked over to the bean counter where he again busied himself    putting up packages for the evening trade.
This was followed by bean counters, that is,  'machines that count beans', which meaning is cited in the Pennsylvania  newspaper The New Castle  News, March 1916:
City Registry Clerk Stanley Treser has    invented a new device. It is known as the bean counter.
Then, lastly, we get to bean counters, that is,  'accountants'. The earliest reference that I can find to the use of 'bean  counter' with this meaning is in the US newspaper The Fort Wayne News And  Sentinel, February 1919, in an article titled The Bean Counter:
The son of Josephus has been promoted in the    quartermaster's department. "I suppose," remarked the Gentleman at the    Adjacent Desk "I suppose that somebody has to count the beans for Colonel    Roosevelt's fighting sons."
The 'fighting sons' were the US soldiers  engaged in the latter part of WWI. The story alludes to the American politician  Josephus Daniels who served in the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, who was  himself a colonel during his military service and was a strong supporter of the  US's involvement in WWI.
The phrase appears in Australia soon  afterwards, either by migration from the USA or by independent coinage. An  example is found in The  Parliamentary Debates of the Australian House of Representatives,  1928:
It is not a bean counter's bill. There is no    attempt to make any savings.
This insinuation that 'bean counters' were  penny-pinching accountants who could't see the bigger picture chimes in well  with the no-nonsense reputation of Australian politicians. The phrase thrived  down under during the 1930/40s before becoming commonplace throughout the  English-speaking world later in the 20th century.
Turn of phrase
A distinctive spoken or written  expression.
Origin
'Turn of phrase' is a commonplace but rather  odd expression - in what sense can a phrase be 'turned'? Ladies are, or at least  used to be, sometimes described as having 'well-turned' legs/thighs/ankles, but  that derives from an allusion to the symmetry and precision of wood turning,  which hardly seems appropriate for an abstract entity like a phrase.
What is a phrase anyway? Well, there's no exact  definition and so it depends on who you ask. Had you been around in 1530 when  the word 'phrase' was coined, you would have been wise not to have asked the  language scholar John Palsgrave. It was he who first the word into print but,  confusingly, gave two differing examples of its meaning. Palsgrave's aim was to  help Englishmen to learn to speak French and to that end he published Lesclarcissement de la Langue  Francoyse, the first grammar of the French language.
Palsgrave illustrated the meaning of the word  'phrase' by giving examples of phrases in English with their French  equivalents.
"Whan all is doone and sayd, pour tout    potaige - a phrasis."
In that illustration he was using the meaning  of the word as we now understand it, that is, 'a small group or collocation of  words expressing a single notion; a common or idiomatic expression'. That  'collection of words' definition of 'phrase' is hardly unambiguous and could  just as well be used for 'idiom', 'saying' or 'expression'. There are also many  other linguistic terms that, while they have specialised uses, can all lay claim  to being phrases - 'proverbs', 'adages', 'maxims', 'clichés' and so on. Added to  that, Palsgrave gave us an entirely different definition of what Tudor gentry  understood by the word 'phrase', that is, not words at all but a 'manner or  style of speech or writing'. In the same French/English grammar he remarked on  "The differences of phrasys betwene our tong and the frenche tong". He went on  to explain "The phrasys of our tong and theyrs differeth". By that he meant, not  that the English and French use different expressions (which even the most  untutored student would surely have known) but that the French have a different  manner and style of speaking to the English.
That 'style of speaking or writing' meaning gives us a lead  in explaining how a phrase can be said to be 'turned'. Before the advent of  printing the beauty of written texts was judged not only on their content but  also on the quality of the writer's calligraphy - much as Japanese Haiku is  appreciated today. The word 'style' derives from the tool used for writing, the  stylus, and to the mediaeval mind writing style was as much about the craft of  calligraphy as it was about the ideas conveyed in the text. An early handwritten  example of Chaucer's Clerk's  Tale, circa 1386, used 'style' with that meaning:
Therfore Petrak writeth this storie, which    with heigh stile he enditeth.
So, a phrase was a style of speaking or  writing, and style meant beauty of expression. We can now interpret a fine 'turn  of phrase' as analogous to a skilfully-crafted piece of wood turned on a lathe.  John Dryden referred to the 'turning' of words in this sense in The Satires of Decimus Junius  Juvenalis, 1693:
Had I time, I cou'd enlarge on the Beautiful    Turns of Words and Thoughts; which are as requisite in this, as in Heroique    Poetry.
Benjamin Franklin - first with many things -  appears to have been the first to use the precise expression 'turn of phrase' in  his Letters,  1779:
A new version [of the Bible], in    which, preserving the sense, the turn of phrase and manner of expression    should be modern.
Up the pole
Various meanings.
Origin
'Up the pole' is an odd phrase, or rather, it  is an odd collection of phrases, in that it has numerous meanings. These  meanings have little to do with each other and, for the most part, little to do  with poles. What is difficult to explain is how and why several different  meanings for the same expression were all coined in the UK just a few years  apart. Of course, poles are commonplace objects and instances of the expression  'up the pole' have abounded in print for centuries - bears/beans/monkeys  climbing 'up the pole', people lifting/digging/staring 'up the pole' etc.  Perhaps now would be a good time to list the various figurative meanings, in  date order of their coinage:
In favour or good repute; strait-laced - A. Barrère & C. G. Leland Dictionary of Slang,  1890:
"Pole, up the, thought well of by your    superiors. Also applied to strict, strait-laced people, who are or like to be    considered goody-goody".
These two slang meanings, which are of      military origin, appear to be the first coinage of 'up the pole' but what,      if any, actual pole was being referred to isn't  clear.
In confusion or error - The Daily News, April  1896:
"She remonstrated with the latter, and told    him he was 'up a pole' - i.e. in the wrong".
In trouble or difficulty - A. R.  Marshall's Pomes from Pink  'Un, 1897:
"He heard himself alluded to as being 'up the    pole'".
[Note: This book was a popular      collection of poems. The Pink 'Un was a newspaper printed on pink paper -      either the Sporting Times or the Financial  Times.]
Drunk - Daily Telegraph, December  1897:
Plaintiff: but your little girl was    frequently saying that you were 'up the poll'. 
Judge: Up the what? The High    Bailiff explained that the term was a slang one for being    intoxicated.
This meaning is antiquated and now rarely      used.
Crazy; at one's wits' end - Westmoreland Gazette, March  1904:
"Plaintiff's definition of the phrase 'up the    pole' differed from that of her cousin who said it meant being drunk. Mrs.    Frasier said that it meant being crazy".
This version appears to have travelled from      the UK to Australia and New Zealand, where it is still commonly used. In a      classic example of folk etymology, 'up the pole' has been suggested to be      named after De La Pole Psychiatric Hospital, Hull, UK - after the fashion of      ' doolally ' being taken from Deolali      sanatorium, India. Inmates who were sent there were supposed to have been      sent 'up De La Pole'. Inventive guess, but De La Pole Hospital was so named      in 1936.
Pregnant - James Joyce Ulysses, 1918:
"That red Carlisle girl? Is she up the pole?    Better ask Seymour that".
As befits such a celebrated book as Ulysses, this is the version      of the phrase that most people know. It is also the only one that appears to      refer directly to any sort of pole - the alternate version of this      'pregnant' meaning are 'up the stick' and 'up the spout' leaving little      doubt about what 'pole' was being referred to. All the early usages of this      meaning in print come from the pens of Dublin based authors, so an Irish      origin seems highly likely.
The only thing tying the versions of the phrase  together is that they (apart from the first) relate to some degree of  difficulty. It may be that the people coining meanings for this expression were  alluding to the apparent difficulty of being stuck at the top of a real pole -  but we aren't ever likely to confirm that. There was a fad for 'pole-sitting' in  the early 20th century, in which participants were certainly 'up the pole' and  could be said to be in some difficulty, but that comes too late for it to have  been the source of this phrase.
Purple patch
Meaning
An overly elaborate or effusive piece of  writing. Also, a period of notable success or good luck.
Origin
'Purple patches', which are also sometimes  called 'purple passages' or 'purple prose', were originally a figurative  reference to florid literary passages, added to a text for dramatic effect. They  were the literary equivalent of adding a patch of purple material to an  otherwise undecorated garment. Purple was chosen because, as well as being a  distinctive colour, it was the colour reserved for emperors and other  distinguished statesmen in imperial Rome. Most of the early references to  'purple patches' contain clear evidence of classical origins, many of them  including Latin text.
The first person I can identify as having used 'purple  patch' in print in English was no less an author than Elizabeth I. In 1598,  Queen Elizabeth translated Horace's Latin textDe Arte Poetica and this was published in 1899 as part  of Queen Elizabeth's  Englishings:
Oft to beginnings graue and shewes of great    is sowed A purple pace, one or more for vewe.
[Note: 'Purple pace' was the translation of  the original 'purpureus pannus'. 'Pace' meant 'passage'.]
Many works of art and scholarship that are  listed as the creation of various English monarchs weren't actually their own  work, the attributions being merely a form of flattery. However, Elizabeth  benefited from the Tudor notion that aristocratic women were suitable recipients  of formal education and her mother, Anne Boleyn, made sure that "she wolde  endewe her with the knowlege of all tounges, as Hebrue, Greeke, Latyne, Italian,  Spanishe, Frenche". The queen became a noted Latin scholar and we can be assured  that the translation (and wouldn't it be nice if we still used the Tudor word  'Englishing' for translations into English?) was by her own hand.
The term 'purple patch' wasn't much used again  until the 18th century, at which time literary critics valued evenness of pace  and style in literary works. Unevenly written texts were singled out for censure  and 'purple patch' was the ideal label for a passage that stood out as overly  florid. This idea was expressed forcibly in the 1704 book of literary  criticism The True Tom  Double:
All a Man writes should be proportion'd Even    and of a piece; and one Part of the Work should not so far out-shine, as to    Obscure and Darken the Other. The Purple Patches he claps upon his Course    Style, make it seem much Courser than it is.
It wasn't until the 20th century that 'purple  patches' were used in relation to anything other than writing. The term then  came to mean 'a period of good fortune or creativity'. An early example is cited  in the newspaper The  Westminster Budget, October 1900:
True, it is hardly to be counted a purple    patch of history, but a man must surely blame himself if he does not find    something epic in the struggle. [of the common  people]
Purple patches took a turn back from the figurative to the literal in  the 1960s when hippies took to wearing purple velvet and patching jeans with it.  'Hendrix purple' is now a recognised shade of dye in the fashion  industry.
Rest on one's laurels
To be satisfied with one's past success and to  consider further effort unnecessary.
Origin
The laurels that are being referred to when someone is said to 'rest  on his laurels' are the aromatically scented Laurus Nobilis trees or, more specifically, their  leaves. The trees are known colloquially as Sweet Bay and are commonly grown as culinary or  ornamental plants.
The origins of the phrase lie in ancient Greece, where laurel wreaths  were symbols of victory and status. Of course, ancient Greece is where history  and mythology were frequently mixed, so we need to tread carefully. The  pre-Christian Greeks associated their god Apollo with laurel - that much is  historical fact, as this image of Apollo wearing a laurel wreath on a 2nd  century BC coin indicates. The reason for that association takes us into the  myth of Apollo's love for the nymph Daphne, who turned into a Bay tree just as  Apollo approached her (anything could happen if you were a Greek god).  Undeterred, Apollo embraced the tree, cut off a branch to wear as a wreath and  declared the plant sacred. Their belief in the myth caused the Greeks to present  laurel wreaths to winners in the Pythian Games, which were held at Delphi in  honour of Apollo every four years from the 6th century BC.
Following the decline of the Greek Empire, the  use of wreaths of laurel as emblems of victory seems to have taken a long  holiday and didn't re-emerge until the Middle Ages. Geoffrey Chaucer referred to  laurels in that context in The  Knight's Tale, circa 1385:
With laurer corouned as a conquerour
And    there he lyueth in ioye and in honour .
[With laurel crowned    as conqueror 
There he lived    in joy and honour]
A 'laureate' was originally a person crowned  with a laurel wreath. We continue to call those who are especially honoured  laureates although the laurel leaves are usually kept for the kitchen these  days. Nevertheless, laureates benefit in other ways; Nobel Laureates get a nice  medal and 10 million Swedish Krona and Poets Laureate (in the UK at least) get a  useful salary and a butt of sack (barrel of sherry).
As to the phrase's meaning, to 'rest on one's  laurels' isn't considered at all a praiseworthy strategy - it suggests a decline  into laziness and lack of application. That's not the original meaning. When  'rest on one's laurels' or, as it was initially, 'repose on one's laurels' was  coined it was invariably part of a valedictory speech for some old soldier or  retiring official. An early example of that usage is found inThe Memoirs of  the Cardinal de Retz, 1723:
The Duke [of Orleans] was old enough to take    his Repose under the Shadow of his Laurels.
Of course, the 'repose' was figurative - no one  was imagining someone sleeping on a bed of laurel leaves, although the citation  above could be construed as referring to laurel trees rather than laurel  wreaths. No such doubts with a slightly later citation from the  London-based Gentleman's  Magazine, 1733, on the retirement of a schoolmaster of Westminster  School:
So thou, paternal Sage, may'st now    repose. 
Nor seek new Laurels    to adorn thy Brows.
As soon as we move into the energetic Victorian  era, the meaning changes and the phrase is used with a distinctly disapproving  tone. Victoria had barely gained the throne when we find this piece in the  review magazine The Literary  Chronicle, 1825, which praises the work of Maria Edgeworth:
We do not affect to wish she should repose on    her laurels and rest satisfied; on the contrary, we believe that genius is    inexhaustible... For Miss Edgeworth there must be no rest on this side the    grave.
Tough audience the Victorians. We are hardly  any more charitable these days. ' One-hit wonders ' are sneered at and, with proper  Anglo-Saxon earnestness, Anthony Burgess dismissed his fellow author Joseph  Heller's inability to write a second book for 13 years following the success of  Catch-22 by sniping that "Heller suffers from that fashionable American disease,  writer's block".
Man's best friend
An animal that performs valuable service to  humans, often with reference to dogs.
Origin
'A dog  is a man's best friend'? Well, if popularity is anything to go by, perhaps  that's true; according to the American Kennel Club, there are more pet dogs in  the USA than there are people in Britain. However, the affection that dogs are  held in by many these days is a fairly recent development. How we used to think  about dogs can be judged by looking at how they have been portrayed in language  over the centuries.
The first linguistic oddity to do with dogs is  the where the word 'dog' came from. The name was preceded by the perfectly good  Anglo-Saxon word 'hound', which was also used in other European languages.  'Dog', in common with several other animal names ending in 'g', like frog, hog,  pig and stag, seems to have been coined around the 13th century for reasons that  no one is at all sure about.
Prior to the 18th century, dogs were kept for  hunting and defence and not as pets. The only deviation from that rule was that  of the derided 'lap-dog', which John Evelyn recorded in his Diary, circa 1684, as a dog  fit only for ladies:
Those Lap-dogs had so in delicijs    [delight] by the Ladies - are a pigmie sort of  Spaniels.
Lap-dogs apart, the phrases used to refer to  dogs in the 16th and 17th centuries indicate their image as vicious and  disease-ridden:
Hair of the dog that bit you , first used in    1546 as a reference to rabies
Cast someone to the dogs, 1556 
The dogs of    war , 1601
Go to the dogs,  1619
Also, phrases that indicate the treatment of  dogs show that they were considered to be of little worth:
Lead a dog's life (1528), 
Not fit for a dog (1625), 
As sick as a dog    (1705),
The unfortunate mutts were considered so beyond  the pale that dog hangings, as punishment for chasing sheep or whatever else  dogs did naturally, were commonplace. The phrase 'give a dog a bad name', 1705,  was originally 'give a dog a bad name and hang him'.
The language relating to canines took a turn  for the better later in the 18th century. The first example in print of the term  'dog-basket' dates from 1768. The need for a name for a piece of furniture  provided specifically for the comfort of dogs shows a clear turning point in  attitudes towards them. This shift in outlook continued steadily and in 1823 we  first find 'dog biscuits', followed in 1852 by 'dog show'. By the mid 20th  century we find clear linguistic evidence that a dog was to be considered almost  on a par with humanity - 'dog-sitter' (1942).
The greatest claim to fame of Warrensburg,  Missouri is that it is where the phrase 'a dog is a man's best friend'  originated. In 1870, a farmer shot a neighbour's dog and, in the subsequent  court case where the owner sued for damages, the lawyer George Graham Vest gave  a tear-jerking speech that became known as the Eulogy to a Dog:
"Gentlemen of the jury, a man's dog stands by    him in prosperity and poverty, in health and sickness. He will sleep on the    cold ground, where the wintry winds blow, and the snow drives fiercely, if    only he can be near his master's side. He will kiss the hand that has no food    to offer; he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with the    roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were    a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wings    and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in    its journey through the heavens." - And so on...
A statue of Old Drum, as the deceased beast was called, stands  outside the town's courtroom. Sadly for the Warrensburg Tourist Board, the  Senator Vest didn't originate the phrase, but he may have read it in a US  newspaper, as it appeared in print fifty years earlier in The New-York Literary Journal,  Volume 4, 1821:
The faithful dog - why should I strive 
To speak his merits, while they    live 
In every breast, and    man's best friend 
Does often    at his heels attend.
To paraphrase Harold Macmillan - 'Fido,  you've never  had it so good '.
Jack of all trades
A man who can turn his hand to many  things.
Origin
With any phrase that includes a name, it's  natural to consider whether its the name of a real person. In this case, as was  the case with many other literary Jacks -  Jack  the Lad ,  Jack  Robinson , Jack Sprat, Jack Horner, Jack Frost, etc, Jack  of all trades was a generic term rather than a living and breathing individual.  In fact, the very long list of terms that include 'Jack' exceeds that of any  other name in English and this reflects the fact that, as a derivative of the  common name 'John', 'Jack' has been used just to mean 'the common man'. This  usage dates back to the 14th century and an example is found in John Gower's  Middle English poem Confessio  Amantis, 1390:
Therwhile he hath his fulle packe, 
They seie, 'A good felawe is    Jacke'.
We now use 'Jack of all trades, master of none'  in a derogatory way. Originally, this wasn't the case and the label 'Jack of all  trades' carried no negative connotation, the 'master of none' part being added  later. Nevertheless, mediaeval Jacks were pretty much at the bottom of the  social tree. The OED defines the generic meaning of the name Jack  thusly:
Jack - A man of the common people; a lad,    fellow, chap; especially a low-bred or ill-mannered fellow, a    'knave'
If 16th century commentators wanted to imply  that a person was stretching their talents too thinly they resorted to the  disparaging Latin term Johannes factotum ('Johnny do-it-all'). In 1592, the  English writer and member of the literary establishment Robert Greene wrote a  pamphlet entitled Groats-worth  of Witte. In that he ventured the opinion that a new writer on the scene  was:
An upstart crow, beautified with our    feathers, that supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as    the best of you. Beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit    the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.
Sadly for Greene's ongoing reputation the  'Upstart crow' was William Shakespeare.
Various trades were populated by Jacks -  lumberjacks, steeplejacks for example, and sailors were Jack-tars.
The name Jack was also added to many  utilitarian objects which in some way took the place of a lad or man, for  example:
Smoke-jack (a roasting spit)
Jack-plane (a    basic carpenter's plane)
Jack-screw (a lifting winch)
Jack-frame (a    carpenter's sawing horse)
Boot-jack (for pulling off boots)
Jack-engine    (a miner's winch)
Jack-file (a coarse file)
There can't have been any trades in the Middle  Ages that didn't make use of a jack of some sort. 'Jack of all trades' entered  the language in 1612 when Geffray Minshull wrote of his experiences in prison  in Essayes and characters of a  prison and prisoners:
Some broken Cittizen, who hath plaid Jack of    all trades.
The 'master of none' addition began to be added  in the late 18th century. The headmaster of Charterhouse School, Martin  Clifford, in a collection of notes on the poems of Dryden, circa 1677  wrote:
Your Writings are like a Jack of all Trades    Shop, they have Variety, but nothing of value.
In 1770, the Gentleman's Magazine offered the opinion that "Jack at all  trades, is seldom good at any."
The earliest example that I can find in print  of the actual phrase 'Jack of all trades, master of none' is in Charles  Lucas's Pharmacomastix,  1785:
The very Druggist, who in all other nations    in Europe is but Pharmacopola, a mere drug-merchant, is with us, not only a    physician and chirurgeon, but also a Galenic and Chemic apothecary; a seller    of druggs, medicines, vertices, oils, paints or colours poysons, &c. a    Jack of all trades, and in truth, master of none.
Maybe taking on 'all trades' wasn't wise but  Jacks were often master craftsmen in their chosen trade. History books tell us  that Cardinal Wolsey built Hampton Court Palace and that Charles Barry built the  Houses of Parliament - don't believe it, it was Jack.
As daft as a brush
Meaning
Very foolish.
Origin
On the face of it, brushes wouldn't seem to be  any more daft than anything else. As the source of the expression isn't obvious,  various suggestions have been put forward as to what form of brush is being  referred to; for instance:
-> The phrase originated as 'as soft as a    brush' and that the brush is the tail of a fox. This is plausible in that    'soft' is a northern English term for stupid and foxes tails are in fact quite    soft to the touch.
-> The brushes in the expression are the boys    that were employed in the 18th/19th centuries to climb inside chimneys to    sweep them. The theory here, which is somewhat less plausible, is that the    boys were made into idiots by being repeatedly dropped on their heads when    being lowered down the chimneys.
Nevertheless, as we shall see, the 'brush' in  this simile is neither of these; it is, as the dictionary would have it "A  utensil consisting of a piece of wood or other suitable material, set with small  tufts or bunches of bristles, hair, or the like, for sweeping or scrubbing dust  and dirt from a surface.", that is - a brush. Are brushes daft? Not  particularly, but then again I've never had a sensible conversation with  one.
When looking for early examples of 'daft  as a brush' in print we find that it first starts appearing the 1950s. An  example is in William Morgan Williams's The Sociology of an English  Village: Gosforth, 1956:
-> The wives of two members of a kin-group    locally thought to be eccentric and extremely unsociable were pointed out by    several people as 'gay queer' and 'daft as a brush'.
[Gosforth is in Cumbria,  UK]
1956 seems later than I would have expected and, as the  word 'daft' has always been used more often in the north of England than in  other places, a scan of some north country references seems in order. Voilà.  'Daft as a brush' it is in fact predated by an earlier variant 'daft as a  besom'. The earliest citation of that that I can find is a listing in William  Dickinson's A glossary of the  words and phrases of Cumberland, 1859:
-> Daft, without sense. "Ey, as daft as a    besom."
A corroboration that the phrase originated with  'besom' rather than 'brush' version comes in another glossary, from just a few  years earlier and collected in the same area - John and William Brockett's A glossary of North country words,  with their etymology, 1846:
-> Fond, silly, foolish. An old Northern word.    'Fond-as-a-buzzom', remarkably silly.
The use of 'fond' to mean foolish predated our  current usage, which is 'to be fond of something or someone'. That present day  meaning migrated from the earlier word, which in time became to mean 'display a  foolish affected for'. In Richard Rolle's Psalter, 1339, the author  refers to 'fonnyd maydyns' (foolish girls). The word appears in more  contemporary language in John Lyly's Euphues: the Anatomy of Wyt,  1578:
-> He that is young thinketh the old man    fond.
So remember, if you are visiting the English  northern counties and some  old  codger  says that you are 'as fond as a  buzzom', isn't exactly a compliment.
Eany, meeny, miny, mo
The first line of a popular children's counting  rhyme.
Origin
Of all of the phrases and idioms in the English  language 'eeny, meenie, miny, mo' must be the one with the widest variety of  spellings. I've opted for 'Eeny, meeny, miny, mo' but there are many others -  'Eenie, meenie, miney, moe', 'Eany, meany, miney, mo' and so on. Added to that,  as far back as the 19th century there have been variants of the rhyme which are  so dissimilar to our current version as to be scarcely recognisable - 'Hana,  mana, mona, mike' (from New York) and 'Eetern, feetern, peeny, pump' (from  Scotland) and many of these now have local variants and words added from other  languages.
What lies behind this variability is that  throughout the 19th century the rhyme spread from different parts of the UK to  every playground in the English-speaking world, but by word of mouth rather than  on paper. There never was an accepted definitive version, so the children who  used the rhyme were very happy to substitute their own words as the mood took  them.
As adults, we might be curious as to whether  the words mean anything and what their origin might have been. Children appear  to have no such concerns. An example comes from the Danish island of Kattegat,  where a rhyme arrived during the British occupation in the Napoleonic  wars:
Jeck og Jill
Vent op de hill
Og Jell    kom tombling efter
...which makes as little sense in Danish as it  does in English but, despite it being entirely meaningless to them, the children  of Kattegat still sing it.
The best known version of the rhyme is the one  that is now widely derided as insulting, especially in the USA, where the middle  two lines originated:
Eena, meena, mina, mo,
Catch a nigger by    the toe,
If he hollers, let him go,
Eena meena, mina,  mo.
A more acceptable version has now established  itself:
Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,
Catch the    tiger/monkey/baby by the toe.
If it    hollers[USA]/screams[UK] let him go,
Eeny, meeny, miny,    mo.
The rhyme is used by groups of children as a  way of selecting someone to take a role that is different from the others. As  difference is unwelcome to children, the formula had to be sufficiently  unpredictable to be accepted as fair. A leader takes the counting role and, in  the rhythm of the rhyme, points to each child in turn. The last line is often  topped off with a short emphasized 'You are It!' or 'O, U, T spells out!', which  all the children join in with. Sometimes the child pointed to at the end of one  count is the one selected - to be 'It' in a game of hide and seek, for example.  In more important choices - selecting who has to ask that grumpy man down the  road for their ball back - the one pointed to last drops out and the formula is  repeated several times until only one is left.
[Note: UK residents who have voted in  today's referendum might notice a parallel with the 'First Past the Post' and  'Alternative Vote' systems.]
'Eeny, meeny, miny, mo' is certainly a strange  line, so does it mean anything and does curiosity about its origin lead us  anywhere? Well, as is so often the case in etymology, yes and no. There is a  similarity between the words of the phrase and some of the numerals in  pre-English Celtic and Cumbrian languages. For example, the oral tradition of  the English coastal town of Yarmouth voices 'one, two, three, four' as 'ina,  mina, tethera, methera'. Also, the word for 'one' in Welsh, Cornish, Irish and  Breton is, respectively, 'un' (pronounced 'een'), 'ouyn', 'aon' and 'unan' - all  of them sounding not unlike 'een' or 'eeny'.
The age of the phrase is uncertain. It first  began to be written down in the 19th century - the scholarly journal Notes and Queries published this in the February 1855  edition:
"The following are used in the United States    for the selection of a tagger...
Eeny, meeny, moany, mite,
Hair, bit, frost, neck,
Harrico, barrico, we, wo,    wack"
This bears more than a passing resemblance to  the English version recorded by Fred Jago in The Glossary of the Cornish  Dialect, 1882:
Ena, mena, mona, mite,
Eggs, butter, cheese, bread.
Stick, stock,    stone dead - OUT."
There's no doubt that the rhyme is older than  the 19th century recorded versions, possibly very much older. The link to the  names of numerals in ancient languages is also likely. Many farmers and  fishermen on the fringes of Britain used such language for counting until quite  recently and many natives of the north of England can still count from one to  five in 'the old way' - 'yan, tan tehera, methera, pimp'.
Ancient Celtic counting system or Victorian  nonsense verse? American in origin or English? Your best bet is to put all the  available theories in a circle and repeat this rhyme - Eeny,  meeny...
Hard-hearted
Lacking mercy; incapable of pity.
Origin
The first mention in print in English of the  term 'hard-hearted' is in Geoffrey Chaucer's 1374 translation of Consolation of Philosophy, the  6th century treatise by the Roman philosopher Anicius Boethius:
Ne no tere ne wette his face, but he was so    hard-herted.
The term reflects the mediaeval belief that the  heart was the organ that controlled one's thoughts and feelings - there being no  understanding of the functioning of the brain at that time. The belief was that  the condition of the heart reflected the senses in a direct and literal way. We  have retained several mediaeval expressions that we now see as entirely  figurative but which were previously akin to a medical diagnosis:
- Cold-hearted
- Faint-hearted 
- Whole-hearted
The last on that list, whole-hearted, is  atypical in that it is a 19th century term and derives from a different meaning  of 'hearted', i.e. 'courageous; spirited'.
The transition from literal to figurative  meaning is matched by the transition in the spelling of the terms. Initially,  the two words were usually written separately, then later as a hyphenated pair  and finally as a single word. Someone with a 'light heart' was initially 'light  hearted', later 'light-hearted' and more recently 'lighthearted' - for  example:
John Palsgrave's dictionary Lesclarcissement de la Langue    Francoyse, 1530: "Lyght herted or mery, alaigre."
William Cowper's    poem The Task, 1785:    "He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch, Cold and yet    cheerful."
Wilkie Collins's novel Queen of Hearts, 1859: "Mrs.    Knifton began to make jokes about it, in her lighthearted  way."
The 15th century literal way of thinking (and spelling) was  resurrected in the 1920s in the popular Tin-Pan Alley song Hard Hearted  Hannah:
They call her Hard Hearted Hannah, 
The vamp of Savannah, 
The meanest gal in town; 
Leather is tough, but Hannah's    heart is tougher, 
She's a    gal who loves to see men suffer!
Of course, to be 'hearted' these days we just need a T-shirt. The  'I heart NY' message began being used in the USA in the 1980s and, in  January 2011, the OED defined a new meaning of the verb heart as "To love;  to be fond of: - originally with reference to logos using the symbol of a  heart to denote the verb 'love'", which is as close as we can get to an  acceptance that the symbol is now part of the language.
Beat  around the bush
Prevaricate and avoid coming to the  point.
Origin
The figurative meaning of the odd phrase 'beat  around the bush' or, as it is usually expressed in the UK, 'beat about the  bush', evolved from the earlier literal meaning. In bird hunts, some of the  participants roused the birds by beating the bushes and enabling others, to use  a much later phrase, to ' cut  to the chase ' and catch the quarry in nets. So, 'beating  about the bush' was the preamble to the main event, which was the capturing of  the birds. Of course, grouse hunting and other forms of hunt still use beaters  today.
The phrase is old and first appears in the  mediaeval poem Generydes - A  Romance in Seven-line Stanzas, circa 1440:
Butt as it hath be sayde full long    agoo,
Some bete the bussh and some the byrdes take.
The poem is anonymous and only exists as a  single handwritten manuscript in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, the  early printed versions all having disappeared. Even at that early date the  author's implication was clearly that 'beting the bussh' was considered a poor  substitute for getting on with it and 'taking the byydes'. If it really was said  'full long agoo' in the 15th century then the English 'beat about the bush' must  be one of the oldest non-biblical phrases in the language. The earliest version  that I can find that adds 'about' to 'beat the bush' is in George  Gascoigne's Works,  1572:
As far as the relative global popularity of the two versions of the  phrase goes, the US version, 'beat around the bush', is becoming the standard, overtaking the UK version, 'beat about the bush' around (or about, if you prefer) 1980.
Dressed to the nines
Dressed flamboyantly or smartly.
Origin
Nine is the most troublesome number in  etymology. There are several phrases of uncertain parentage that include the  word. Examples are,  cloud  nine ,  nine days' wonder  and the infamous  whole nine yards . We can add 'dressed to the  nines' to that list.
The most frequently heard attempts to explain the phrase's  derivation involve associating the number nine with clothing in some way. One  theory has it that tailors used nine yards of material to make a suit (or,  according to some authors, a shirt). The more material you had the more kudos  you accrued, although nine yards seems generous even for a fop. Another commonly  repeated explanation comes from the exquisitely smart uniforms of the 99th (Lanarkshire) Regiment of  Foot, which was raised in 1824. The problem with these explanations is that  they come with no evidence to support them, apart from a reference to the number  nine (or 99, which seems to be stretching the cloth rather thinly). The regiment  was in business in the early 19th century, which is at least the right sort of  date for a phrase that became widely used in the middle of that  century.
The first example of the use of the phrase that  I can find in print is in Samuel Fallows' The Progressive Dictionary of the  English Language, 1835. In his entry for the phrase 'to the nines' Fallows  gives the example 'dressed up to the nines' and suggests that it "may perhaps"  be derived from 'to thine eynes' - to the eyes. Not bad as a  hypothesis, but without any evidence (and I can find none) 'may perhaps' is as  far as we can go with that.
What counts against the above explanations is  the prior use of the shorter phrase 'to the nine' or 'to the nines', which was  used to indicate perfection, the highest standards. That was in use in the 18th  century, well before 'dressed to the nines' was first used, as in this example from William Hamilton's Epistle to Ramsay,  1719:
The bonny Lines therein thou sent me,
How    to the nines they did content me.
It  is worth noting that the number nine has long been used as a superlative. The Nine Worthies were characters drawn from the Pagan  and Jewish history and from the Bible. The Nine  Worthies, usually called simply The Nine, were well-known to  mediaeval scholars as the personification of all that was noble and heroic. The Poetick Miscellenies of Mr John  Rawlett, 1687, provides the  earliest reference to 'to the Nine' that I can find:
And Poets most who still make their    address
In private to the Nine.
It is clear that 'the Nine' that Rawlett was  referring to were the Nine Worthies. It is just as clear that 'dressed to the  nines' is merely an extension of 'to the nine/s' and that we could equally well  'dance to the nines' or 'philosophize to the nines'. The search for the link  between 'nines' and dress sense has unearthed no convincing candidates. Absence  of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but I'll stick my neck out here and say,  with this phrase and with the other 'nines' phrases, 'nine' doesn't refer to  anything specific - it just means 'a lot'.
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