15 amusing stories behind common expressions

This phrase might be a little puzzling when you think about it. What does a random, common name have to do with time? But “nick” in this phrase doesn’t refer to a person’s name. In the 1500s, a “nick” was reportedly a word for a small, precise marker. Because of this, “in the nick” or “in the very nick” meant “at the exact right moment.” The phrase evolved to refer to time with “in the nick of time” or “just in the nick of time.”

This one goes way back – to the Middle Ages! It refers to shady salespeople in medieval marketplaces, who, when a customer would purchase a pig, would swindle them by secretly putting a cat in the bag instead of a pig. The customer would pay for a pig, and then when they got home and opened the bag – or, literally, let the cat out of the bag – they would realise that they’d been scammed. The expression has lasted all the way to today, and continues to refer to the revealing of a usually unpleasant secret!

If you immediately guessed that this was going to be one of the common English expressions with dark origins, you’d be right. We call the front seat of a car, next to the driver, “shotgun” because of a practice in the Old West. Wagon drivers would often be accompanied by men with shotguns, who would keep a lookout for robbers and bandits, using the shotgun to ward them off if need be. You’ll certainly see this practice depicted in Western films, but it does, in fact, derive from reality! And those Western movies, including the John Wayne film Stagecoach, helped popularise the expression “riding shotgun” to mean claiming the spot next to the driver.

Here are more expressions with surprisingly dark origins.

When we think about animals that might take a really long time to get somewhere, we probably think of sloths or turtles – not cows. But for farmers trying to finish a busy day by milking the cows – usually the final task of the day – any time that they had to wait for the cows to return to the barn probably felt like an incredibly long time. Especially if the cows didn’t wander back until late at night or even the next morning.

The phrase likely dates back to the 16th century, where the phrase appeared in print for the first time in – of all things – a French textbook. “I am tied by the foote till the Cow come home,” read a line of the 1593 textbook Ortho-epia Gallica.

You might hope that the origin of this expression is not literal – but, alas, it most likely is. The most popular explanation for its origin suggests that soldiers undergoing painful medical procedures or even punishments would literally bite down on a bullet to keep from screaming or biting their tongues. In fact, in a 1796 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, the author describes this: “It is a point of honour in some regiments, among the grenadiers, never to cry out…whilst under the discipline of the cat of nine tails; to avoid which, they chew a bullet.”

How many of these most common idioms in English do you use regularly?

Eyes don’t have apples, of course, but by now we’ve surely realised that many common English idioms require us to suspend disbelief. This phrase is an old one, dating back to the ninth century AD; King Aelfred of Wessex, in the year 885, wrote, “Poor Richard was to me as an eldest son, the apple of my eye.” But he didn’t just come up with that phrase. The “apple” of your eye was what people around that time, with their rather spotty science, called the pupil. The reason it took on such a strong connotation of love and value because people back then deeply valued their eyesight (not that we don’t today, but this was a world without proper eye care or vision regulation). So basically, when you say someone or something is the apple of your eye, you’re saying that they’re akin to your pupil.

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Source: RD.com