Isn’t it nice when someone does all the work for you?

The Straight Dope looked into the origin of “hard-boiled” as used in crime novels. The phrase began as “hard-boiled egg,” referring to someone who didn’t readily part with money, perhaps because of an older joke that a hard-boiled egg is something that’s “hard to beat.” The phrase may have first appeared in print thanks to Mark Twain. There’s some debate about that, but Twain being an American icon, I like his reference. It continued to mean cheap or petty through 1917 usage.

What I find interesting is the meaning then seemed to change rapidly:

By 1919, hard-boiled meant tough, and often violent. In that year U.S. army lieutenant Frank “Hardboiled” Smith was among several men court-martialed for their brutality in running a stockade outside Paris …

By this point the connection between well-done eggs and no-nonsense personalities was cemented: a 1924 movie comedy about a would-be tough guy was called A Ten-Minute Egg, and author P.G. Wodehouse was fond of describing a particularly forbidding character as a “twenty-minute egg.”

I used a version of this expression in the commentary this week describing trial attorneys anticipating a flood of income from new nuisance lawsuits in Colorado instigated by a $375 million settlement against the operators of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapon plant. A three judge panel ruled 2 to 1 in favor of approving a settlement in a case where a previous ruling had found against the plaintiffs because there was perceived damage and not actual damage. The meaning of the expression is of course based on the literal meaning of licking your chops when thinking of something good to eat. That has evolved to “…be eager to do something you think will be satisfying or pleasant. That develops a mental image for me of a crowd of lawyers literally licking their chops.

Imagine my surprise to discover “growing pains” are a real phenomenon for some children and not merely a colloquial phrase! A quick google yields many hits on these “real” growing pains. These overwhelm the usage I was looking for: any problems encountered early in an undertaking.

Growing pains probably have little to do with growth. The pains are most common in children ages 4 to 12, whose growth rate is lower than that of both infants and adolescents; most growth occurs near the knees, but the pain isn’t centered there; children who have growing pains grow at the same rate as those without. straightdope.com

breakingmuscle.com says “the origin of the term ‘growing pains’ is disputed. The Cleveland Clinic for Children maintains that the phrase was coined in the 1930s to 1940s, while several other studies claim that the term has been around since the 1800s.”

I guess I was lucky to never encounter these physical growing pains.

Quora.com posts an explanation for the origin of the expression, which refers to “…any bad omen that predicts a bad outcome,” after warning that both Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln both said, “Don’t believe quotes on the Internet.” Perhaps that is a hint the explanation that is given might not be accurate, but it is interesting. According to Chapter 5 of the Book of Daniel in the bible King Belshazzar sees strange words written on a wall (apparently by the hand of God). Daniel interprets to words to mean “Numbered, numbered, weighed, divided.” The “writing on the wall” was further interpreted to mean there were plans to invade and divide the kingdom.

This is one of the most famous expressions that is attributed to a fanciful (i.e. false) origin. Mentalfloss.com explains the tall tale is that digging up coffins to reused grave space found many with scratch marks, which indicated the people were buried alive. The alleged solution was to install a string to the wrist of the corpse and attach it to a bell. People sat in the graveyard to listen to a bell ringing as a plea for help. The truth is that a “safety coffin,” which monitored the corpse for movement and triggered a bell and waved a flag, was patented in the 19^th century. The expression actually originated from substituting a look-alike horse in a race or athlete in a sporting event. The talented look-alike was the “dead ringer.” “Dead” refers to “absolute, exact, complete” while “ringer” originally was the person arranging the swap and later came to mean the substituted competitor.

Wikipedia has a direct description of the origin of this expression. “The phrase “span-new” meant as new as a freshly cut wood chip, such as those once used to make spoons. In a metaphor dating from at least 1300, something span-new was neat and unstained.” Spick was added in the 16^th century and may have evolved from the Dutch words spiksplinter nieuw, meaning “spike-splinter new.” The use of the expression became commonly used to indicate something is completely clean when the household cleaner “Spic and Span” was put on the market in the 1920s.