Red Herrings and White Elephants: Albert Jack

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This is a British book, and so some of the phrases were unfamiliar to me. But that's a relative few. The majority are phrases within my experience. It is interesting to note that most of the sayings do not even originate from the English language, and are cobbled up from Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, French, Swedish, Norse (when it's raining cats and dogs or when someone went berserk), Hindustani (when someone has gone Doolally), Jewish (when you tell someone to eat his heart out) and even Gaelic (when you declared something as phoney), just to name a few.

Red Herrings And White Elephants: The Origins of the Phrases Red Herrings And White Elephants: The Origins of the Phrases

Example: The London Bridge became a white elephant. The bridge was relocated to Havasu City Arizona, where it now remains as a tourist attraction. Origin: From the Burmese belief that albino elephants are sacred. They can’t be used for work and they must be lavished with the ultimate amount of care. If the King of Siam wished to get rid of a particular courtier, he gave a gift of a white elephant. The courtier dared not offend the King with a refusal although he was fully aware that the cost of upkeep of such an animal was ruinous. Dicey": From some Mr. Dicey. I doubt it. The derivation from "dice" just sounds much more plausible. A White Elephant is an expression used to describe something that has, or will, become a huge burden to those who possess it. It suggests the cost of possession could ruin a person financially. For this we travel to Thailand, in the days when it was known as Siam. According to the legend white elephants … When we look out of the window and it is Raining Cats and Dogs, don’t go out there. There are several suggestions for the origin of this phrase, one alluding to a famous occasion when it actually rained frogs. Apparently many were lifted into the air during a howling gale and then dropped to the …

If you happen to be a bootlegger, your profession recalls the Wild West outlaws who sold illegal alcohol by concealing slender bottles of whiskey in their boots. If you're on cloud nine, you owe a nod to the American Weather Bureau's classification of clouds, the ninth topping out all others at a mountainous 40, 000 feet. If you opt for the hair of the dog the morning after, you're following the advice of medieval English doctors, who recommended rubbing the hair of a dog into the wound left by the animal's bite. Red Herrings and White Elephants. The Origins of the Phrases We Use Every Day : - signed or inscribed book

Red Herrings and White Elephants: The Origins of the Phrases Red Herrings and White Elephants: The Origins of the Phrases

For me this doesn't really explain it satisfactorily. What about the info about the root of the Latin proverb? (although according to my sources the phrase comes from a collection of medieval French poems "Li Proverbe au Vilain" which was published around 1190) - & the little quip at the end... not my sense of humour. At coffee mornings, fetes and similar events in the village where I grew up there was often white elephant stall, which had all sorts of odds and ends that people want to get rid of.

But the roots of “dicey” lie, not in the clouds, but on the gambling tables (or the floor of an RAF hangar). “Dicey” comes from “dice,” the plural of “die,” the little spotted cubes of chance used in many games. A mission that was “dicey” to the RAF pilots was fraught with danger, and their safe return was as uncertain as a roll of the dice they often used to pass their time on the ground. This sense of both chance and danger has carried over to our modern use of “dicey” to mean “seriously risky,” often with overtones of disaster if the effort fails.

Red Herrings and White Elephants - Albert Jack 1843581299 - Red Herrings and White Elephants - Albert Jack

Bold as brass": Brass is hard, brass is shiny, brass is eye-catching. Brass is, in a word, bold. Is the word "brazen," originally meaning made of brass but now also meaning "bold and without shame" supposed to be just coincidental and having nothing to do with the origin of this phrase? Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_module_version 0.0.5 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA19203 Openlibrary_edition une oie blanche” (= a white goose) refers to a young woman, naive and unenlightened regarding the birds and the bees. If you have even a slight interest in the history of language and phrases this book is a must read. A delightful compendium of anecdotes on everything from minding your p's and q's to pulling out all the stops, Red Herrings and White Elephants is an essential handbook for language-lovers of all ages.

An enjoyable and interesting guide to the historic stories behind many current and recent-times sayings within the English language.