Phrases, Sayings, and Their True Meanings

[BigO]

Another just for fun topic.

People use a lot of sayings in everyday conversations, and I wonder where they really come from or mean. Some seem like common sense, and have completely different meanings. Others seem to be used only in certain regions.

So, which ones do you use or know about, and what are their origins or real meanings (if you know)?

I'll kick it off with a few of my favorites.


Going Balls Out, or Balls to the Walls - Originated from old steam powered machinery. A spinning governing device sat on top, which was a pair of balls mounted on hinged metal rods. The increased speed caused the balls to pull out, and the term was used to describe this operating level.

The Whole Nine Yards - I was always under the impression that it was coined because of the length of ammunition belts loaded on fighter jets in WWII, and used to describe how hard the pilots fought. "Gave 'em the whole nine yards". Turns out this may be wrong, and might be because of the amount of fabric used in a good suit, similar to "Dressed to the nines".

 

[MrB8]

Great idea, looking forward to more posts, I really like that kind of stuff, very interesting in many ways!

 

[TPW]

What a fun thread W4I! I've got one...

Cut to the Chase - (get to the point) A phrase that originated in the US film industry. Many early silent films ended in chase sequences preceded by obligatory romantic storylines. The first reference to it dates back to that era, just after the first 'talkie' - The Jazz Singer, 1927. "Jannings escapes... Cut to chase."

 

[MrB8]

What a fun thread W4I! I've got one...

Cut to the Chase - (get to the point) A phrase that originated in the US film industry. Many early silent films ended in chase sequences preceded by obligatory romantic storylines. The first reference to it dates back to that era, just after the first 'talkie' - The Jazz Singer, 1927. "Jannings escapes... Cut to chase."

I never understood why would anyone want to skip romantic scenes to watch a chase, to each his own, I guess. :becky:

Is it that people already have their romantic lives fulfilled that they seek other stuff, or its not high on their list.

 

[MrB8]

A shot in the arm

Meaning: A stimulus.

Origin: This expression derives from the invigorating effect of injecting drugs. A shot is of course US slang for an injection, either of a narcotic or medicinal drug. That term has been in use since around the beginning of the 20th century; for example, this piece from the San Francisco Chronicle Supplement, October 1904:

"I varied hardly a minute each day in the time of taking my injection. My first shot was when I awoke in the morning."

'A shot in the arm' came soon afterwards and the first mention of a figurative use of it in print that I can find is from

the Maine newspaper The Lewiston Evening Journal, January 1916:

The vets can give politics a shot in the arm and the political leaders realize it.

 

[MrB8]

Catch 22

Meaning: A paradox in which the attempt to escape makes escape impossible.

Origin: The title of Joseph Heller's novel, written in 1953 and published in 1961, (properly titled 'Catch-22' - with a hyphen). The first chapter was also published in a magazine in 1955, under the title 'Catch-18'.

The paradox is presented as the trap that confined members of the US Air Force. In logical terms the 'catch' was that, by applying for exemption from highly dangerous bombing missions on the grounds of insanity, the applicant proved himself to be sane (after all, that's what any sane person would do). If anyone applied to fly they would be considered insane. Either way; sane or insane, they were sent on the missions. This might be described logically as, 'damned if you do and damned if you don't', 'the vicious circle', 'a chicken and egg situation', or 'heads I win, tails you lose'.

In the book, this is explained thus:

Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. "Is Orr crazy?"
"He sure is," Doc Daneeka said.
"Can you ground him?"
"I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That's part of the rule."
"Then why doesn't he ask you to?"
"Because he's crazy," Doc Daneeka said. "He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to."
"That's all he has to do to be grounded?"
"That's all. Let him ask me."
"And then you can ground him?" Yossarian asked.
"No. Then I can't ground him."
"You mean there's a catch?"
"Sure there's a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

The phrase is now often misapplied to any problematic or unwelcome situation.

 

[BigO]

Good ones MrB8, especially the Catch 22! :thumb:

 

[MrB8]

Thanks!

 

[schlittle]

Here in the UK you will still hear people use sweet fanny adams or they may shorten it to sweet FA. An example of use would be if somebody came back from a casino and then they said they had won "sweet fanny adams" or they may say "sweet FA" and in this day and age they basically mean "sweet fuck all". So they mean "nothing"

SWEET FANNY ADAMS

Meaning

Nothing.

Origin

The eight-year-old Fanny Adams was murdered in Alton, England in August 1867 by Frederick Baker, a 24-year-old solicitor's clerk. Her dismembered body was found in a field near the town. She was buried in Alton cemetery. The inscription on the headstone indicates the strength of feeling against the murderer:

Sacred to the memory of Fanny Adams aged 8 years and 4 months who was cruelly murdered August 24th, 1867.
Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul but rather fear Him who is able to kill both body and soul in hell. Matthew 10:28.
This stone was erected by voluntary subscription."
​

The case was the source of enormous public concern and newspaper reports of the time concentrated on the youth and innocence of the victim. Everyone living in England at the time would have known the name of 'sweet' Fanny Adams. With typical grisly humour, sailors in the British Royal Navy came to use the expression to refer to unpleasant meat rations they were often served - likening them to the dead girl's remains. Barrère and Leland recorded this usage in their A dictionary of slang, jargon and cant, 1889:

"Fanny Adams (naval), tinned mutton."
​

It wasn't until later that 'sweet Fanny Adams' came to mean 'nothing'. The term 'fuck all' has long been with us with that meaning, although how long isn't clear as politeness caused it not to be recorded in print until the 20th century. It surely dates back to at least the early 19th century. The coincidence of Fanny Adams' initials caused F.A. or 'Fanny Adams' to be used as a euphemism for 'fuck all'. Walter Downing, an Australian soldier who fought in Europe in the First World War, wrote an glossary of WWI soldier's slang called Digger Dialects in 1919. He is the first to record the link between F.A. (meaning 'fuck all') and Fanny Adams:

"F.A., 'Fanny Adams', or 'Sweet Fanny Adams' - nothing; vacuity."
​

 

[namsokiek]

To take with a grain of salt.

This originated from the time of kings and courtiers. The courtiers were constantly vying for the kings favor and would resort to nefarious actions and other skullduggery to undermine their fellow courtiers; the worst of which included poisoning their drink.

Without the knowledge of chemistry we have now, their most popular poisons where biologically based. This usually meant that it was also slow acting; so getting some poor sop to test for poison wouldn't tell you anything.

The solution was to add a dash of salt to your drink, the salt would kill the biological poison and quickly became the thing to do to any food or drink offered by anyoneelse. The expression was soon adapted to the words and advice of other courtiers because the advice of others was sometimes as fatal as the poison itself.

Hence the phrase, "to take it with a grain of salt" means that you doubt the good will in the advice is genuine hence you will act upon their advice very catiously and only after taking the neccessary precautions against harm to one's self.

 

[aBone2pick]

Thanks Obama


A phrase that originated from an unknown source, that was then popularized by Youtube celebrity Jenna Marbles. It has since taken root in American culture across both costs and everywhere in between.

Meaning

It is a sarcastic phrase used to emphasize ingratitude. It is most commonly used to describe undesirable circumstances that no one could possibly have influenced.

Myspacebarkeybroke..thanksobama.

 

[MrB8]

[h=1]Salad days[/h] [h=3]Meaning[/h] The days of one's youthful inexperience.
[h=3]Origin[/h] From Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra, 1606:

CLEOPATRA: My salad days,
When I was green in judgment: cold in blood,
To say as I said then! But, come, away;
Get me ink and paper:
He shall have every day a several greeting,
Or I'll unpeople Egypt.

​

'Salad days' is used these days to refer to the days of carefree innocence and pleasure of our youth. It has also been used to refer to the time of material affluence in our more mature years, when the pressures of life have begun to ease - something akin to 'the golden years'. Shakespeare meant the former, and the clue is in the colour. While he used green in other contexts to signify jealousy - 'the green-eyed monster' in Othello and, in Love's Labours Lost "Green indeed is the colour of lovers", it is used here to mean immature. The green of salad leaves, which are invariably short-lived, is an obvious allusion to youthfulness. Green is also used in other expressions to mean unready for use, for example, 'green (unripe) corn', 'green (unseasoned) timber and 'greenhorn' (an inexperienced recruit).

The phrase 'salad days' lay dormant for two hundred years or more but became used widely in the 19th century; for example, this citation from the Oregon newspaper The Morning Oregonian, June 1862:

"What fools men are in their salad days."
​

Salad Days was later used as the title of a highly successful is a musical, which premiered at the Bristol Old Vic in 1954. The music was written by Julian Slade and the lyrics by Dorothy Reynolds and Julian Slade. This was also the inspiration for the Monty Python spoof sketch Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days, in which the carefree young things featured in the musical were hacked to pieces in a typically gory Sam Peckinpah manner.

 

[MrB8]

[h=1]Fancy-pants[/h] [h=3]Meaning[/h] Overly elaborate, swanky or pretentious - especially of dress. Also applied to people who act in that manner.
[h=3]Origin[/h] The first reference to the term in print is in an advert in the Maine newspaper The Bangor Daily Whig And Courier, in October 1843. In that, a company of auctioneers called Williams and Prince advertised the sale of "Fancy Pants - Cassimere". That clearly refers to pants that were fancy. Cassimere was a type of soft woollen twill cloth. Not especially fancy by later standards but quite exotic for Bangor in the 1840s.

By 1870 the term is reported as being used with a hyphenated adjective, that is, effectively as a single word, with our current 'pretentious; swanky' meaning of the term. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the Pennsylvania newspaper The Titusville Morning Herald used it that way in an advert in October 1870:

"Just opened! Still another lot of imported diagonal and basket coatings and fancy-pants cassimers."
​

Having checked copies of that paper, there are several entries of that advert for October 1930 but they don't include a hyphen between fancy and pants. This suggests that the advert was merely one for fancy cassimere trousers and not with our current understanding of fancy-pants. That 1870 citation of the use of fancy-pants as an adjective is further put into doubt by the fact that the phrase doesn't appear with that meaning anywhere else for another 60 years.
This inclusion from a reader's letter appeared in several US newspapers on 30th December 1930, including The Coshocton Tribune:

"'Dear Fancy Pants' writes someone from down in Texas."
​

That is a clear usage of the term as a name for someone who wears, or who might be imagined to wear, fancy pants, rather than a description of the pants themselves. The first record that hyphenates fancy-pants, with the unequivocal intention of it being used as an adjective, is from the same paper a few years later in November 1939:

[Ralph] "Bellamy borrowed the money to come west and borrowed some more to rent himself a Beverly Hills mansion complete with swimming pool and fancy-pants butler."
​

 

[MrB8]

[h=1]Filthy rich[/h] [h=3]Meaning[/h] Very rich, possibly having become so by unfair means.
[h=3]Origin[/h] This little phrase can't be explained without looking at the word lucre. From the 14th century lucre has meant money and is referred to as such by no less writers than Chaucer and John Wyclif. These references generally included a negative connotation and gave rise to the terms "foul lucre" and "filthy lucre", which have been in use since the 16th century. "Filthy lucre" appears first in print in 1526 in the works of William Tindale:

"Teachinge thinges which they ought not, because of filthy lucre."
​

Tindale was here using the term to mean dishonourable gain.
Following on the the term "filthy lucre", money became known by the slang term "the filthy", and it isn't a great leap from there to the rich being called the "filthy rich". This was first used as a noun phrase meaning "rich people; who have become so by dishonourable means". It was used that way in America, where it was coined, from the 1920s onwards. Here's an item from the Ohio newspaper The Lima News, February 1929, which deplores the get-rich-quick attitudes of some who were exploiting those who had to sell their homes at unreasonably low prices in order to eat during the economic crash:

"There is a depressed market. If any of our stock-gambling filthy rich want a winter home, now is the time to acquire it."
​

As time went on the negative associations have softened somewhat. It has become to mean "extremely rich" rather than "dishonourably rich", although there may still be a trace of an unfavourable implication associated with it.

 

[BigO]

Eating Crow / Humble Pie


Meaning
It is an American colloquial idiom, meaning humiliation by admitting wrongness or having been proved wrong after taking a strong position.Crow is presumably foul-tasting in the same way that being proved wrong might be emotionally hard to swallow. The exact origin of the idiom is unknown, but it probably began with an American story published around 1850 about a slow-witted New York farmer.Eating crow is of a family of idioms having to do with eating and being proved incorrect, such as to "eat dirt" and to "eat your hat" (or shoe), all probably originating from "to eat one's words", which first appears in print in 1571 in one of John Calvin's tracts, on Psalm 62: “God eateth not his words when he hath once spoken”.


Origin
Literally eating a crow is traditionally seen as being distasteful; the crow is one of the birds listed in Leviticus chapter 11 as being unfit for eating. Scavenging carrion eaters have a long association with the battlefield, "They left the corpses behind for the raven, never was there greater slaughter in this island," says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Along with buzzards, rats, and other carrion-eating scavenging animals, there is a tradition in Western culture going back to at least the Middle Ages of seeing them as distasteful (even illegal at times) to eat, and thus naturally humiliating if forced to consume against one's will.

In the modern figurative sense of being proven wrong, eating crow probably first appeared in print in 1850, as an American humor piece about a rube farmer near Lake Mahopack, New York. The OED V2 says the story was first published as "Eating Crow" in San Francisco's Daily Evening Picayune (Dec. 3, 1851), but two other early versions exist, one in The Knickerbocker (date unknown), and one in the Saturday Evening Post (Nov. 2, 1850) called "Can You Eat Crow?". All tell a similar story: a slow-witted New York farmer is outfoxed by his (presumed urban) boarders; after they complain about the poor food being served, the farmer discounts the complaint by claiming he "kin eat anything", and the boarders wonder if he can eat a crow. "I kin eat a crow!" the farmer says. The boarders take him up on the challenge but also secretly spike the crow with Scotch snuff. The story ends with the farmer saying: "I kin eat a crow, but I be darned if I hanker after it." Although the humor might produce a weak smile today, it was probably a knee slapper by 19th century standards, guaranteeing the story would be often retold in print and word of mouth, thus explaining, in part, the idiom's origin. In 1854 Samuel Putnam Avery published a version called "Crow Eating" in his collection Mrs. Parkington's Carpet-Bag of Fun.

A similar British idiom is to eat humble pie. The English phrase is something of a pun—"umbles" were the intestines, offal and other less valued meats of a deer. Pies made of this were known to be served to those of lesser class who did not eat at the king's/lord's/governor's table. Another dish likely to be served with humble pie is rook pie (rooks being closely related to crows). "Pie" is also an antiquated term for the European Magpie, a type of crow. There is a similarity with the American version of "umble", since the Oxford English Dictionary defines crow as meaning "intestine or mesentery of an animal" and cites usages from the 17th century into the 19th century (e.g., Farley, Lond Art of Cookery: "the harslet, which consists of the liver, crow, kidneys, and skirts)."

 

[arkham]

What is the origin of blue balls?

Why does "crack of sparrow's fart" mean dawn?


Very informative thread for non-english people.

 

[BigO]

What is the origin of blue balls?

Looks like it was a slang term, thought to have originated in the United States, first appearing in 1916.

Assumed to be said because of the blood build up in the testicles, causing a darker color, or indicating that they're "feeling sad" (or blue) because of being denied release.

Why does "crack of sparrow's fart" mean dawn?

A combination of the terms "The Crack of Dawn" and "Sparrows Fart" . Both meaning very early in the morning. "Sparrow's fart" is a jokey variation on the very ancient phrase "at cock's crow", meaning dawn.

Very informative thread for non-english people.

Thanks!

 

[burtybasset]

Daylight Robbery.

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with this term outside of England, what this saying originally meant was the government decided to introduce a tax on homes based on how many windows they had.

Home-owners as a way to avoid paying this tax would brick up their windows hence the saying daylight robbery.

It is now used to describe paying over and above the worth of something - a rip off, Etc.

Brilliant thread W4I.

 

[kickinthemebs]

Hair of the Dog:

The expression originally referred to a method of treatment of a rabid dog bite by placing hair from the dog in the bite wound. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer writes in the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898): "In Scotland it is a popular belief that a few hairs of the dog that bit you applied to the wound will prevent evil consequences. Applied to drinks, it means, if overnight you have indulged too freely, take a glass of the same wine within 24 hours to soothe the nerves. 'If this dog do you bite, soon as out of your bed, take a hair of the tail the next day.'"

 

[BigO]

Brilliant thread W4I.

Thanks Burty! :becky: