I recently watched the movie “Good Will Hunting” again, and Will has the following conversation through a cafe window.

“Will: Do you like apples? 
Clark: What? 
Will: Do you like apples? 
Clark: Yeah. 
Will: Well, (holding a piece of paper with a telephone number written on it against the window) I got her number. How do you like them apples?”

Wikipedia and other sources speculate the expression came from World War I when allied soldiers used mortar shells they called “toffee apples” (candied apples that have a stick in them to hold them while being eaten). Soldiers may have shouted the phrase across the lines “in sort of a victory cry” after a mortar shell hit the target.

The first known printed use was in a U.S. Army unit’s history. A soldier used the remark to express disappointment when he was told the unit was not going to receive many supplies.

Charles Funk in his book, “A Hog on Ice,” observes that when someone says a speaker using this expression is referring to someone they wouldn’t recognize. Perhaps they once knew the person, but have now forgotten. He speculates the expression originated over arguments about painters depicting both Adam and Eve with navels while critics insisted they did not have them. 

A Sherlock Holmes fan proposed in 1944 that when Holmes died and went to Heaven he was assigned to solve the mystery of what happened to Adam and Eve. “He alone knew all others from Adam, and could speedily pick out the missing pair, for he alone…knew that they would be the only two without navels.”

A reader inquired about this expression and I’m once again relying on the Phrase Finder for the origin. It means “items of quality offered to those who aren’t cultured enough to appreciate them.” The expression may have originated in France in the early 1400s.   In appeared in Matthew 7:6 of Tyndale’s Bible, in 1526, “Nether caste ye youre pearles before swyne.” “The biblical text is generally interpreted to be a warning by Jesus to his followers that they should not offer biblical doctrine to those who were unable to value and appreciate it.”

I was recently asked about this expression. Wikipedia lists several versions of the term used around the world; nine countries use “storm in a glass of water.”  The expression is used to describe a small event exaggerated out of proportion, or making a fuss over a trivial matter. The Phrase Finder proposes that the phrase probably derives from the writing of Cicero in about 52 BC, “He was stirring up billows in a ladle. “The Duke of Ormond’s wrote in a letter in 1678, “Our skirmish seems to be come to a period, and compared with the great things now on foot, is but a storm in a cream bowl.” The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1830 included the description, “Each campaign, compared with those of Europe, has been only…, a storm in a wash-hand basin.” The American “tempest in a teapot” is used in very few other countries, but apparently has a Scottish origin. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1825 demeaned a poet by writing, “What is the tempest raging o’er the realms of Ice? A tempest in a teapot!”

The term, “Lame Duck,” is being mentioned frequently in the news about Congress. The term is used to describe elected officials still serving in office, but are not slated to continue. It is frequently believed that the officials are in a weaker position, but there is another contention that a politician can make stronger decisions because they are no longer posturing for the next election. According to blurtit, the term was coined in the early 18th century to describe a broker on the London stock exchange who defaulted on his debts. “Horace Walpole is said to be the first man to have originally used the words in writing about the broker.in 1761, and the line was…”Do you know what a Bull and a Bear and Lame Duck are?”