Category Archives: Expressions

Put Your Foot Down

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No bicycles sign

No, not bicycles

To put your foot down is to be unyielding and insistent. Phrases.com offers no citations, but says

This expression is thought to have originated in 16th century but it actually became popular and common in 18th century. It is observable that when you clump or tramp your foot on ground, it means to demand someone’s attention.

A commenter on actuarialoutpost wonders if “the origin started around the time the bicycle was invented. In order to stop, you had to put your foot down.” But wikipedia says “bicycles were introduced in the late 19th century” which is incompatible with a 16th century origin. Though it is an inventive hypothesis.

Skin in the Game

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To have skin in the game is to be incurring risk, monetary or otherwise – in the outcome of an effort. The phrase was recently popularized by investor Warren Buffet, but seems to be older.

The late columnist William Safire sought the origin of the phrase and didn’t resolve the issue. Some trace the phrase to a related element of Shakespeare’s play The Mercahnt of Venice where a character offers a pound of his own flesh as collateral.

The phrase makes me think of another saying, that when you eat your ham -and-egg breakfast, realize that the hen was involved but the pig was committed. Wonder where the came from?

Lie Travels Around the Globe While the Truth is Putting on Its Shoes

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Quoteinvestigator says this expression has been evolving for three hundred years.

hiking bootIn 1787 “falsehood” was reaching “every corner of the earth”. In 1820 a colorful version was circulating with lies flying from “Maine to Georgia” while truth was “pulling her boots on”. By 1834 “error” was running “half over the world” while truth was “putting on his boots”. In 1924 a lie was circling the globe while a truth was “lacing its shoes on”.

You can read the citations for yourself on the site. I’m more excited by a recent study that shows this expression is true.

False news spreads faster than true stories, and it’s because of humans, not bots, according to a new study published today in Science. axios

I’m still angry at Russian meddling in our elections, and fake news continues to be a threat. Did the Russians change anyone’s vote? Who can tell? You and I look at loads of information – even if I told you a particular story you viewed was false-news-from-Russia (or, for that matter, from a fellow citizen) I doubt you could say that particular item tipped you over the edge.

The reason fake news works is because we’re human. “Avoid temptation to shift the blame elsewhere… Even if we solve bots and the foreign interference problem, it wouldn’t solve the problem of online misinformation.”

Researchers studied more than 4.5 million tweets between 2006 and 2017. They used six fact-checking sites, including Politifact and Snopes, to determine if an item was true.

They found false stories — especially political ones — traveled faster, farther and deeper into the network than the true kind. (True stories took six times as long as false ones to reach 1500 people.) And, false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth.

We humans are programmed for this. I’m reminded of the notion that, if our ancestors believed there was a lion rather than wind behind rustling grass, they lived to have offspring who led to us. Our brains find it safer to believe anything that confirms our fears, and so we share the item. The study says novelty also grabs us, and something we never heard before is more likely to be false (at least, on Twitter) but we share it.

sneakersIf you’ve tut-tutted over claims about male and female bell peppers, or Mars will appear the size of the full moon tomorrow night, or rumors of gang initiations that kill innocent people, or pizzagate – well, it’s just human nature. It takes effort to engage all that lovely pre-frontal cortex, but it’s worth it.

Pull the Rug Out

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wizard on flying carpet

This wizard should be safe

This is how you upset someone’s plans or ruin their chance for success, perhaps by withdrawing previous support.

Grammarist says the phrase originated in the early 20th century, in America, though their examples are recent.

Etymonline does not provide citations, but says “pull the rug out from under (someone) “suddenly deprive of important support” is from 1936, American English. Earlier in same sense was cut the grass under (one’s) feet (1580s).”

I guess old phrases never die, they just get reworked.

Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

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I caught this on NPR:

Home of sliced bread

Chillicothe Baking Company’s building in Chillicothe, Missouri, where bread was first machine-sliced for sale

You’ve heard people call some innovation the greatest thing since sliced bread. Well, that was a real event. The first commercially sliced bread was sold in Chillicothe, Mo., on July 7, 1928. People had to slice it themselves in the old days. The innovation is now the occasion for an annual bluegrass festival, and lawmakers are debating a bill to declare sliced bread day

I remember my grandmother telling me how happy she was to buy bread instead of baking two or three times a week (related to family income I think), but I don’t remember her mentioning sliced bread. So I wanted to learn more.

Wikipedia says bread cut with a slicing machine was advertised as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.” I guess those images of a Frenchman peddling along with a long loaf, bare naked (the loaf that is), under one arm are more romantic than preferred.

Thank you, Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, USA, for inventing the first loaf-at-a-time bread-slicing machine. One of his early customers, Gustav Papendick, figured out how to easily slide the sliced loaf into a bag. Sliced bread was a hit, and In 1930 Wonder Bread began marketing sliced bread nationwide. The convenience was credited with increasing consumption of bread and everything you might slather on it.

Theatlantic adds “with such products rapidly penetrating the American home, automated bread-making was not only an invention benchmark, but also a key indicator of the mechanization of daily life from the 1930s onward.” I guess that’s where my grandmother comes into the story.

Cut Them Some Slack

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sailing shipThis phrase refers to applying lesser standards to someone’s effort, usually because they are trying hard or somehow encouraging your sympathy.

The phrase made me think of wearing a loosely fitted garment, something allowing you to move easily. But theidioms says the phrase comes from docking ships, “where ‘give me some slack’ meant to loosen the rope.”

25-startling-origins doesn’t live up to its click-bait title: “It is believed to be nautical in origin, and concerns not pulling on the rope so as to give the other person a chance to untangle it.”

I’m more familiar with the version “cut me some slack,” and cutting the rope doesn’t sound like a good idea when docking a ship – though it may be a last resort to a tangled mess. But I admit I’m a landlubber. Someone on wordwizard who claims to know boats says “CUT SOME SLACK and CUT SOMEONE SOME SLACK are not nautical terms nor have they ever been!” They’re pretty emphatic about it.

The only citation I found was this:

A similar phrase, with a similar meaning but slightly different form – ‘cut slack for’ – was used in 1855 by Frederick Douglas in his book My Bondage and My Freedom. theidioms