I’ve been trying to figure out why Abraham Lincoln was called “Honest.”  I’ve read various explanations.  Some of them seem like folk lore, intended for elementary school teachers to tell their students.  For example, when young Abraham worked as a store clerk, he realized that he overcharged one of his customers by a few pennies.  He then walked a bunch of miles to the person’s house and returned the pennies.  He probably wanted to brag about how the penny featured an image of him…

I also read that when he worked as a lawyer, he would often help poor people for free.  That doesn’t really seem honest, actually. 

The last explanation is incredibly dubious and will most likely not be used by 2nd grade teachers:  Abe Lincoln got the nickname “Honest Abe” for his work as a cockfight official. 

In the three examples, it sounds more appropriate to call him, “Stalker Abe,” “Robin Hood Abe,” and “Creepy Abe.”

They idiom, “to take it with a grain of salt,” comes from Pliny’s Naturalis Historia in 77 AD.  He gives a description of an antidote for a certain poison.  Here’s the quote translated from Latin:

“After the defeat of that mighty monarch, Mithridates, Gnaeus Pompeius found in his private cabinet a recipe for an antidote in his own handwriting; it was to the following effect: Take two dried walnuts, two figs, and twenty leaves of rue; pound them all together, with the addition of a grain of salt; if a person takes this mixture fasting, he will be proof against all poisons for that day.”

It suggests that the bad effects can be tempered by taking a grain of salt.

I wish we would say, “take it with twenty leaves of rue,” instead.

Recently I have heard people use the expression “jump on the bandwagon” a lot (thanks to the undefeated Kansas City Chiefs).  Literally a bandwagon was a wagon that carried the band in a parade, circus, or other similarly silly event.  Supposedly, the idiom, “to jump on the bandwagon,” was coined in 1848 when Dan Rice, a clown, used his bandwagon to attract attention for his political campaign.  Other politicians saw the attention he was getting and also wanted to “jump on the bandwagon.”

This seems kind of odd to me.  You would think a clown aspiring to be a politician would try to downplay his clownliness.  Not ride around on a wagon blasting clown music.  

Clownliness.

The idiomatic expression used to explain sex, “the birds and the bees,” is said to first appear in a Samuel Coleridge poem in 1825.  However, even earlier, Shakespeare mentions the copulating creatures in King Lear. 

Let me tell you something though; the way birds and bees have sex is neither pleasurable nor possible when dealing with humans. 

Trust me.

The saying “an elephant never forgets” is likely a variant of a Greek saying, “the camel never forgets an injury.”  Not to mention, elephants are trainable and retain a sense of territory or “home.” 

Crap.  Now I have to add the elephant to my list of animals that sound like serial killers.

Remember…. the elephant is thinking about what you did to it.  Forever.

Why do we say “knock on wood” when we try not to jinx ourselves? I don’t know.  I’ve tried to find out why, but I can’t really find any convincing reasons.  I did learn that back in the 1800s we said “stomp on wood.”  This originated from the early settlers who would stomp on the floor of their log cabins to avoid bad luck.  That still really doesn’t explain why stomping on the floor would thwart bad luck.  This was the closest I got:  way back in the day, some people believed that wood and trees had good spirits.  It was good luck to tap trees to let the wood spirits within know you were there.

I hate wood spirits.  They’re so dang mysterious.

A “minced oath” is an expression based on a profanity that has been changed to be more acceptable.  Like “shoot” or “darn” or “frick.” 

I wish I didn’t have to use minced oaths.  I feel like such a friggin’ sissy having to wussyfoot my way around these words.  Gosh dang.  It gets me so ticked off.  Society overemphasizes the wrongness of these words to the point where it increases their notoriety.  If we stopped treating them as taboo, they wouldn’t be taboo.  And people wouldn’t care.  It makes me mad as heck.  FUDDDDDDDDGGGGGGE.

The slang phrase “going postal,” as in getting uncontrollably furious and violent, derives from tragic incidents involving United States Postal Service workers. Between 1986 and 1997, more than 40 people were murdered by spree killers in over 20 acts of workplace violence.  You know what hasn’t murdered 40 people?  E-mail.

A Catch-22 refers to an unsolvable logical dilemma.  The phrase comes from Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel “Catch-22.”  The number 22 has no significance.  Heller originally intended to call it “Catch-18,” but this was rejected by his publisher for being too similar to the title of another recently published war novel.  “Catch-11” was also proposed and rejected, due to its similarity to the film “Ocean’s Eleven” which was released in 1960.  “Catch-17” was then also rejected for similar reasons.  “Catch-14” was rejected because the publisher didn’t think 14 was a “funny number.”  If I were Joseph Heller, I would have just given up.  Clearly, there was no way he would win this battle with his publisher.

“Scot” is a Scandinavian word for tax or payment.  “Scot free” just referred to someone not paying taxes.  So, if you don’t pay taxes you’ll be getting away scot free, in the literal sense.  It’s unlikely that you’ll get away from the government scot free.

10-91H is the police code for “Stray Horse.”  I will make sure I watch for this when I am listening to the police scanner.  I would hate to get in the middle of this.  I bet the LAPD would give a whole new meaning to beating a dead horse.

I’ve never really understood the saying, “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.”  Of course I can.  That’s what I do with my cake.  Apparently the confusion comes from a distortion of the original 1546 quote, “wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?”   The original saying meant, you can’t eat your cake and still possess a cake (because you ate it).  Clearly, cake was a philosopher’s nightmare in the 1500s.

Schrodinger’s cake.

So nerdy. 

The euphemism for death, “to kick the bucket” likely originates from a method of suicide in the Middle Ages where someone standing on a bucket with a noose around their neck kicks the bucket out from underneath them, thus hanging themselves.  …That doesn’t seem like a euphemism.  That sounds way more grisly.  I’d rather just pass away… whatever that means.

If you think about it, the expression, “there is more than one way to skin a cat,” is pretty messed up.  I mean, who skins cats?  And why so many ways?  I couldn’t find a definite origin of the phrase.  In 1678, a variant of the idiom was first published as “there are more ways to kill a cat than by choking it with cream.”  That’s weird.  Also, Mark Twain used the quote a couple hundred years later.  It’s also been said that the saying comes from a gymnastics move called “skinning the cat,” but I don’t really buy it.  The only thing I do know is that skinning a cat is a harbinger of becoming a serial killer.

The idiomatic phrase “make no bones about it,” used to state a fact that allows no room for doubt, comes from 15th century England.  When people wanted to show their dissatisfaction with something, they would say that they “found bones in it,” referring to unwanted bones that could be found in soup.  If you had no bones in your soup, it was ingested without difficulty.  This also supports the stereotype that English food is miserable.