Princeton Happenings

You’ve all heard that saying before…you all know what it means….but did you ever wonder where it originated from? We did too.

Yesterday, I was asking Andrea what she thought I should blog about this week and sarcastically she replied, “Why don’t you blog about the price of tea in China!” We both laughed. Then we stopped and asked, where did that saying come from anyway? And what about a Catch-22? We know what it means, but what exactly does it <em>mean</em>? So I started to do a little research about these little phrases known as idioms. These are the little sayings you hear all the time – “I’ve got an axe to grind”, “We’re going to paint the town red”, “Don’t let the cat out of the bag”.

The more I researched these, the more I am convinced that my mother speaks only in idiomatic phrases! There are so many of them! And she USES so many of them!

The funnest part about researching them was thinking that I could actually figure out the origin before finding it on the page. For example- “Mind your Ps and Qs” was something my fourth grade teacher, Sister Antonita, would always yell at us if she caught us looking at our classmate’s paper. The origin is this: <em>Comes from the early pub days when beer and ale was served in pint and quart containers. The tab was kept on a chalkboard used to count the pints and quarts consumed. To watch your Ps and Qs is to control your alcoholic intake and behavior</em>. – Very interesting coming from a nun!! 🙂

But my favorite so far is “Saved by the bell”! You would think this was an easy one – saved by the school bell, perhaps? Or maybe it has to do with the ringing of the bell in a boxing match, possibly. But this is the origin I found and I was completely surprised:

<em>There was a strange disease in the 1500’s that would slow one’s heartbeat and breathing enough that upon inspection, the afflicted person would indeed seem quite dead. When England began to run out of room to bury recently deceased people, they dug up the coffins of people who had long been deceased, removing their bones from the coffins and placing them in a bone house and re-using the gravesite. When opening the coffins of long ago buried bodies, they noticed that 1 out of every 25 coffins had scratch marks on the inside. The town folks had been burying people while they were still alive. To avoid anymore people being buried alive, a string would be tied to the wrist of each corpse, threaded through the coffin,up through the ground, and tied to a bell.
Someone would have to sit in the graveyard all night and listen for the bell to ring, just in case the corpse was not really a corpse. Hence the phrases: Saved by the bell, Dead ringer and Graveyard shift.</em>

Anyway, I found this to not only be fun, but very informative and I can’t wait to start throwing origins at my mother when she starts throwing the idioms my way! (which may be as early as this evening!) 🙂

Here are a couple of links to see some other fun idioms! Enjoy!

http://www.bachelorsdegree.org/2011/01/30/30-common-english-idioms-and-the-history-behind-them/

http://www.pride-unlimited.com/probono/idioms1.html#a