Meanings & Origins of Phrases, Sayings and Idioms

[mykidsrnutz2]

STOOL PIGEON

What is a stool pigeon? Does it refer the bird’s habit of defecating on statues? Does it have something to do with furniture?

Stool does not refer to the piece of furniture or to dung. It is a variant of stale, meaning decoy. It comes from the Anglo-Norman estale or estal, a decoy bird used to entice a hawk to fly into a net. The French word probably originally derives from the Germanic steall meaning a place or standing position, or in this case a stationary bird. The root is also the source of the modern stall. From the c.1440 Anglo-Latin lexicon Promptorium Parvulorum Sive Clericorum: Stale, of fowlynge or byrdys takynge, stacionaria. (Stale, of fowling or birds taking, stacionaria.)

[janking]

WITCH HUNT


The term "witch-hunt" is often used to refer to similarly panic-induced searches for perceived wrong-doers other than witches. The best known example is probably the McCarthyist search for communists during the Cold War.

A witch-hunt is a search for witches or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic, mass hysteria and mob lynching, but in historical instances also legally sanctioned and involving official witchcraft trials.

The classical period of witch-hunts in Europe falls into the Early Modern period or about 1450 to 1700, spanning the upheavals of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in tens of thousands of executions.

Many cultures throughout the world, both ancient and modern, have reacted to allegations of witchcraft either with superstitious fear and awe, and killed any alleged practitioners of witchcraft outright; or, shunned it as quackery, extortion or fraud. Witch-hunts still occur in the modern era in many communities where religious values condemn the practice of witchcraft and the occult.

(When i was looking "witch hunt" up..i came across this Salem Witch Hunt stuff...here is the link..this is kinda interesting and creepy..
http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/salem/

[auntietonka]

Who Let The Cat Out Of The Bag

The origins of this phrase come from when farmers would sell chickens at market. Most of the time they would just throw the chickens in a bag and sell them as however many were supposidly in there. But cats were cheaper than chickens so many times farmers would put a cat into the bag with the chickens and if someone suspected something they would open the bag. At that point the cat would jump out of the bag, thus giving away the secret.

[mykidsrnutz2]

SAVED BY THE BELL
This is boxing slang that came into being in the latter half of the 19th century. A boxer who is in danger of losing a bout can be 'saved' from defeat by the bell that marks the end of a round.

There is a widespread notion that the phrase is from the 17th century and that it describes people being saved from being buried alive by using a coffin with a bell attached. The idea being that, if they were buried but later revived, they could ring the bell and be saved from an unpleasant death. The idea is certainly plausible as the fear of burial alive was and is real.

[KittyTyme]

“The pen is mightier than the sword.”

In seventeenth-century England, a free press was banned by the government. This meant that people who disagreed with the government and printed their views were punished. In spite of this, people published their ideas and opinions in illegal pamphlets that were distributed to the public. The proverb means that the written expression of ideas cannot be stopped by physical force.

[janking]

Cat got your tongue

The phrase probably comes from a custom in the Mideast hundreds of years ago, when it was common to punish a thief by cutting off their right hand, and a liar by ripping out their tongue. These severed body parts were given to the king's pet cats as their daily food.


(ewwww...yuck....next time one of youse cats brings in something from outside..better really check to see what it is..LOL)

[Irie]

Balls to the wall

A very colorful phrase, one needs to be careful when using "balls to the wall". Although its real origin is very benign, most people assume it is a reference to testicles.
In fact it is from fighter planes. The "balls" are knobs atop the plane's throttle control. Pushing the throttle all the way forward, to the wall of the cockpit, is to apply full throttle.

Alternatively,

Early railroad locomotives were powered by steam engines. Those engines typically had a mechanical governor. These governors consisted of two weighted steel balls mounted at the ends of two arms, jointed and attached to the end of a vertical shaft that was connected to the interior of the engine. The entire assembly is encased in a housing.

The shafts and the weighted balls rotate at a rate driven by the engine speed. As engine speed increases, the assembly rotates at a faster speed and centrifugal force causes the weighted balls to hinge upward on the arms.

At maximum engine speed - controlled by these governors - centrifugal force causes the two weighted balls to rotate with their connecting shafts parallel to the ground and thereby nearly touching the sides - the walls - of their metal housing.

So, an engineer driving his steam locomotive at full throttle was going "balls to the wall". The expression came to be used commonly to describe something going full speed.

[KittyTyme]

Check your 6.


Look behind you. From the aviation term, "your 6 o'clock" referring to the relative location of an aircraft with 12 o'clock being directly in front of the airplane.

[janking]

Wet behind the ears



The allusion is to the inexperience of a baby, so recently born as to be still wet.

This phrase was in circulation in the USA in the early 20th century - twenty years before it was first recorded elsewhere. The converse of the phrase - 'dry back of the ears', was also known in the USA from around the same date. That was recorded in the American Dialect Society's Dialect Notes IV, 1914:

"Dry back of the ears, mature; - of persons."

[crispy]

fine kettle of fish --

A kiddle or kiddle net is a basket set in the sluice ways of dams to catch fish, a device well known from the time of the Plantagenets. Royal officers had the perquisite to trap fish in kiddles, but poachers often raided the traps of fish, frequently destroying the kiddles in the process. Possibly an official came upon a destroyed trap and exclaimed, 'That's a pretty kiddle of fish!' or something similar, meaning 'a pretty sorry state of affairs!' and the phrase was born. Repeated over the years, kiddle was corrupted in everyday speech to kettle, giving us the expression as we know it today.